


Into Words

by dirigibleplumbing



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Carol Danvers - Freeform, Character Study, Disregards the Ending of SM:HC Pepperony-wise, Fix-It, Flip Phone, Genius Tony Stark, Getting Together, Happy Ending, Harley Keener - Freeform, Howard Stark - Freeform, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, James "Rhodey" Rhodes & Tony Stark Friendship, James "Rhodey" Rhodes is a Good Bro, Kamala Khan - Freeform, Kate Bishop - Freeform, M/M, Maria Stark is not so great either quite frankly, Mentor Tony Stark, Minor Bucky Barnes/Natasha Romanov, Minor Carol Danvers/James "Rhodey" Rhodes, Past Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Tony Stark/Tiberius Stone, Pepper Potts - Freeform, Peter Parker - Freeform, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Reconciliation, Riri Williams - Freeform, Team Stony, Text Messages, Tiberius Stone - Freeform, Tony Stark Angst, Tony Stark Feels, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Vision - Freeform, art history nerd Tony Stark, author is a fan of parentheticals, author is an art history nerd, background/past Tony/OCs, eventual Steve Rogers/Tony Stark as serious business, natasha romanov - Freeform, past Steve Rogers/Tony Stark as fuckbuddies, polymath Tony Stark, quotes from the movie Clueless there are 3 of them can you find all of them?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-01
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-05-16 19:43:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14817710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirigibleplumbing/pseuds/dirigibleplumbing
Summary: Tony Stark is not a narcissist, a liar, a soldier, a good listener, a hypocrite, or any of the other bullshit words people like to use. He knows himself, what he is and isn’t, what he does and doesn’t know. And he knows not just numbers, equations, and schematics, but words too.After Siberia, expectations of Tony feel higher than ever: he’s heading the Avengers; working to revise the Accords; trying to do right by the teenagers who for some reason look up to him; plus the usual work for Stark Industries. He doesn’t really have time to deal with what’s left of his friendship with Steve, let alone figure out his own shit. (He ends up doing a lot of that anyway.)





	Into Words

**Author's Note:**

> For the “…is a good bro” (here, Rhodey is the good bro) square on my 2018 STONY MCU Bingo card.
> 
> Alternate title: “Words That Don’t Describe Tony Stark.”
> 
> I’m publishing this on the hypothesis that there’s no such thing as “too pretentious” when it comes to fanfiction :D 
> 
> This fic is a combination of three concepts. (1) I wanted to be pedantic about the term “narcissist” and some other things Tony gets accused of being. (2) I wanted to write Tony as an art history nerd, and for him and Steve to flirt by talking about art. (3) I wanted to write a _Captain America: Civil War_ fix-it wherein Tony asks for Steve’s help mentoring Peter. 
> 
> For clarity on the two biggest warnings:  
> \- the "Past Rape/Non-con" is implied/referenced. As usual, it's between Tony and Tiberius Stone. Everything that happens between Steve and Tony is entirely, enthusiastically consensual.  
> \- the Implied/Referenced Child Abuse is a little more prominent, and features emotional and verbal abuse (with no physical abuse aspect).  
> \- I chose not to use the "rape/non-con" archive warning for the reason that it is implied and not a huge part of the fic, but it was a judgment call and may be upsetting to some readers, so read on with caution. 
> 
> There’s some character names / concepts that I pulled from the comics, but this is ZERO kinds of comics canon-compliant. Riri Williams, Tiberius Stone, Carol Danvers, and Kate Bishop may resemble their 616 counterparts in certain ways but that’s by no means my focus. (Kamala Khan may be more like her comic counterpart in that I’ve actually read all of her comics to date, but the universes they exist in are so different it’s pretty much moot.)
> 
> This fic takes place in the aftermath of _Captain America: Civil War_ , and both Tony and Steve apologize to each other and have hurt feelings toward each other, though their feelings about this change over the course of the story. They discuss the Accords together briefly a couple of times. Also note that this is from Tony’s point of view and he deals with them a lot. I consider myself team Stony but am usually accused of having a pro-Tony bias. I have no interest in debating their conflict in _Civil War_ nor the Accords. If you are looking to debate please go on your way. 
> 
> Thank you to the amazing [dasyatidae](http://archiveofourown.org/users/dasyatidae/pseuds/dasyatidae) for beta!
> 
> I made a cover / moodboard for this fic:  
> 

####  **Unlettered**

 

It’s not that anyone forgets that Tony’s a genius—as if he would let them. It’s that people, or most of them anyway, assume that because his highest-profile work has to do with the empirical realm of numbers, figures, and forces of the universe, he doesn’t have mental space to spare for words—for poetry and art, literature and philosophy. It’s true that he can think in numbers (bases 10, 2, 8, and 16, mainly, though he can convert in a pinch) and that he often communicates in gestures (it’s what sparked the idea for the gestural interface he uses with his holograms), but his capacity for other forms of expression is constantly underestimated—especially baffling given his famous motormouth, in his opinion.  

It’s obvious, to Tony, that the Iron Man armor is an homage to Sir Thomas Malory, to Tolkien’s _Sir Gawain and the Green Night_ , to the glimmering gold-copper alloyed plackarts, pauldrons, and rondels, the steel armet helms and gardbraces that line the hall of arms and armor at the Met. He’s not sure how anyone can look at the design of the arc reactor and not see the influence of Sol LeWitt’s _Six Geometric Figures_ , but no one ever brings it up. No one mentions how the suit he pilots owes its swooping lines to Hector Guimard, its curves of gold to Charles Rennie Mackintosh, its streamlined silhouette and blocks of chromatism to Constantin Brancusi, Jean Arp, and Umberto Boccioni. (Well, okay, so it’s probably a good thing no mentions Boccioni—the early 20th century’s Italian Futurist art movement and its association with fascism really puts a pall on the term “futurist.”)

It doesn’t occur to people that at the same time that he was making his first circuit board, he was also teaching himself to read with _The Once and Future King_ , _The Canterbury Tales,_ and _The Hobbit_. It doesn’t occur to anyone that spending a lonely childhood in a mansion on Fifth Avenue gives a young kid many opportunities to run off and sneak into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to stand on his tiptoes and press his face to the glass that encases the works of the great armorers, Missaglia, Helmschmied, and Seusenhofer. Everyone at boarding school thought he was just taking the class on musical aesthetics and the seminar on globalization to try to get into the teaching assistant’s pants. Even Rhodey thought he took courses at MIT with names like “Pragmatics in Linguistic Theory” and “Enlightenment and Modernity: Victorian Modernity” just to piss Howard off. (It’s true that that was a nice bonus.)

When pressed, he’ll tell people that he speaks Spanish because so many of the staff the Starks kept spoke it, French and Latin because the boarding school Howard sent him to insisted fluency was required of a truly educated young man, and that he learned German, Japanese, Mandarin, and Hindi for business reasons, from tutors. (It’s true what everyone always says about how much easier it is to pick up languages after you already speak a handful of them.) Most often he says that machine code is his second language, and he doesn’t mention that he’s also conversational in Hungarian and Hebrew because of Ana Jarvis, Italian because of his mother, that he picked up more Farsi and Urdu during his confinement than he let on to his captors.

When Tony commissioned a copy of Alexander Calder’s “Black Widow” as a centerpiece for the lobby of Stark Tower and a gift for Natasha, everyone assumed it was Pepper’s doing. (Well, he did cultivate the impression that he didn’t know or care much about modern art, but that was just to annoy Pep, originally.) When he returned to New York after all the bullshit with Killian, Bruce mentioned seeing the footage of the Malibu mansion being destroyed and wondered aloud why Tony had a piano in his living room, like Tony hadn’t learned to play “Take 5” by ear after hearing a Dave Brubeck record when he was 5 years old. One night in the tower, Thor regaled them with an Asgardian version of _The Second Lay of Gudrún,_ and when Tony jumped ahead to the part with the potion of forgetfulness and asked Thor if those things really work on Asgard, Thor answered enthusiastically, but everyone else looked at him like he’d sprouted a second head.

One time a few months after the Ultron crap, Tony stopped by the Avengers Compound to see how things were and brought a Joseph Beuys pencil drawing he’d picked up at an auction. When he gave it to Steve, he got this look like he’d never seen Tony before, and for a second Tony thought he’d fucked up somehow—but then they started a conversation about gesamtkunstwerk and the problematic legacy of Richard Wagner and what it was like being alive during the emergence of Bauhaus. The next time Tony visited, the drawing was hanging in Steve’s office. Steve asked him to be on the lookout for any Anselm Kiefer woodcuts he might run into, so that’s all right.

So, yeah, Tony knows some things about art. About philosophy, poetry, history. About words. Even if other people don’t.

 

_________

####  **Narcissist**

 

Tony knows that “narcissist” is not the right word for what he is. Sure, words change, and in common parlance, he displays what could be described as narcissism. But psychologically speaking, Tony is more accurately described as _self-absorbed_ than as anywhere close to having a high score on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. If you really wanted to pathologize—this would be where you messed up, “Natalie Rushman,”—borderline personality disorder or simple egotism would be closer to the truth.

Because Tony Stark knows textbook narcissism. Textbook narcissism is a man so invested in how others perceive him and so used to seeing the people close to him as extensions of himself that he’d go to any lengths to maintain his image. Even if that means things like tossing his wife’s shoe collection out of a third-story window because she’s bought heels that make her taller than him in his dress shoes. Or shredding the blueprints for a perfectly functional air-to-surface missile system, instead of admitting that anyone (let alone a kid) could improve on his designs.

Simply put, textbook narcissism is Howard Stark. It’s stealing his son’s schematics for a new pistol grip without ever realizing that it’s something to feel guilt or shame over. It’s insisting that his transistor design is correct and he would _never_ misplace a decimal point in a conductivity equation, even though he’s sobered up now and Tony is _trying_ to be polite when he points out what power of ten it should really be. It’s having an affair with his secretary and then buying a Magnette Airline coupé as an apology gift, even though his wife doesn’t drive, because it was her fault anyway, she’s the one who said the wrong thing in front of the senator when she _knew_ what a big day it was for him, can’t she think of anyone but herself? It’s the magical thinking of denying that he could possibly have a drinking problem, let alone be an alcoholic—he’s Howard Stark, so he can’t have any flaws, and if he goes through a bottle a day, that’s just because it’s been a particularly busy week at the office. If the household staff has overheard something about sexual dysfunction, then it must be entirely his wife’s fault, and if his doctors are saying things about cirrhosis of the liver and cardiovascular disease, then they’re clearly just quacks who need to be replaced with someone more qualified.

It’s lashing out and regaling Tony with a list of every single time he’s fucked up—from when he was 2 years old and cried while Howard was giving a speech at the company Christmas party to just two days ago when he went over Howard’s head to Obie with a solution for the high leakage current problem that was setting back fabrication—and a reminder that he’s nothing but a disappointment, a mistake, a worthless incompetent who fails at every turn to live up to the standards Howard has set for him.

A narcissist doesn’t know how to say “Good job, son” or “I’m proud of you.” That would suggest that his son is something external to him rather than a mere facet of his identity. The closest he can come is to congratulate himself on what a good job he did of having a son and being a dad. So what comes out of the narcissist’s mouth instead is: “You’re my greatest creation.”

(Tony’s lucky that he’d rated above Captain America in that estimation, really; Howard had liked to frame his contribution to Project Rebirth as proof that everything Steve had ever accomplished was thanks to Howard’s efforts.)

So yeah. Tony has some ideas about narcissism.

 

_________

####  **Liar**

 

Another word people like to use for Tony is _liar_. And it’s not that Tony doesn’t lie. He is in, fact, excellent at it. He’s exemplary at inventing lies, at tailoring them to his audience, at throwing them out casually, at balancing them with the right amount of truth and vulnerability, at keeping track of which things he’s said to which people, which things he’s implied, which things he’s insinuated. It’s that he doesn’t lie to the people who are important to him, and he doesn’t lie about the things that matter.

A liar is a father who says “It’s for your own good, you know,” when he sends you to boarding school away from everyone who you’ve ever known. It’s a mother who avoids your eyes and tells you, “He’s just busy, dear.” It’s your first boyfriend, who keeps telling you, “You know you like it,” who assures you, “I’m _not_ yelling, stop freaking out so much,” who promises, “I won’t tell your father about us,” who tells you, “It’s your fault, anyway.” A liar is the man who says “I love you like you’re my own son, Tony,” when he’s actually trying to take over your company, who says “I know Howard wasn’t always there for you, but I’ve got your back,” when really he’s already hired terrorists to murder you on your next business trip.

It might even be someone who says, “I know it’s hard. I’m here for you if you have an attack like that again,” and then leaves you alone in bed having a panic attack by yourself because you accidentally called the armor to you during a nightmare.

A liar is, without a doubt, someone who looks you in the eye and says “That’s all I know,” when really he knows who murdered your parents. A liar is definitely someone who says, “Then we’ll do that together, too,” and then doesn’t call you when he has information that you’ve been chasing the wrong suspect for the bombing at the UN and that you’re actually being set up by a former Hydra agent with a grudge against your team.

It’s not him, Tony knows. He stood at that podium and said, “I’m Iron Man.” He held Pepper’s soft white hand, delicate as a faberge egg, and said, “I love you,” even though he’d never said it to anyone before and felt like the arc reactor was exploding in his chest. He sat across from Steve and said, “Ultron. My fault,” even though the last thing he wanted was for Steve to be reminded of what a fuck-up he was, of how much blood was on his hands. He told Steve, “I don’t want to see you gone,” even though it’s too raw, too real, too much—and of course now Steve’s gone anyway. He shut his eyes and pressed Pepper against his chest, now empty of shrapnel but still somehow raw and damaged, and managed to say, “I know we can still be friends again someday,” even though it didn’t seem true, yet.

He says, “Nice work in DC. My dad never gave me a lot of support, and I’m just trying to break the cycle.” (He also says, “Don’t cut me off when I’m complimenting you,” but, Peter could do with a reminder to slow down now and then.) He says, “You did good, kid.”

He tells Rhodey, “Hey. You’re gonna walk again. I know it.” He says, “You’re going to fly again.” And he makes it true.

 

_________

####  **Soldier**

 

Tony has been around soldiers his whole life. Airmen, marines, privates, whatever. He’s watched soldiers die.

He knows he’s not one.

It's true that the people who _create_ wars and fund them are people like who Tony Stark used to be—industrialists, capitalists, weapons manufacturers. But they can’t exist without soldiers.

Tony was raised to believe in an abstraction, an ideal of soldiers. (If soldiers were people, were friends, humans, he might sympathize with them. Start thinking about their injuries, their traumas, their suicides. And we couldn’t have that, could we?) He was taught that a soldier was the noblest thing anyone could be—that _obeying_ (as long as it was the right people he obeyed) was the noblest thing he could hope to do—and that he should be ashamed he wasn’t more suited to being one. That it was all he could hope for to make their jobs easier with better weapons and bigger explosions and cooler gear.

But of course reality tends to be more _Don Quixote_ than _The Iliad._ Soldiers aren’t just hypothetical. And they don’t have a lot of their own choices to make. Tony knows a thing or two about that as well. The only thing he’s really chosen for himself that he’s gotten to keep has been Iron Man, and it’s the best thing.

In the privacy of his own mind, he thinks he’s more like a knight than a soldier. He never says it out loud.

Maybe it’s a contradiction that he still thinks so highly of not just the armed forces but the idea of soldiers, and yet is so set against being one. That he still feels guilty that he isn’t as noble and good as soldiers are supposed to be. That as much as he fears and hates being beholden to an authority, what he misses, sometimes more than anything else, is being part of a team; he misses trusting a leader and being trusted back, knowing that he can follow the orders he’ll get because they’ll be good ones. Knowing that if he does have to disobey one, his team will have faith that it’s for a good reason, that maybe he knows something they don’t. So yeah, it could be a contradiction, but it’s who he is.

And then there’s Steve—it keeps coming back to Steve, doesn’t it—who was always told he wasn’t good enough to be a soldier, and did everything in his power to do it anyway. It’s easy to say that anyone would have jumped at the chance to fight Nazis, but the truth isn’t that simple. Many of Steve’s contemporaries had thought the war in Europe was none of America’s business. A lot of the inspiration for ethnic cleansing had come from American slavery and Jim Crow laws, after all.

(Tony knows he’s not like Steve, okay. He knows.)

The thing about Steve is that if Tony has inconsistent feelings on soldiers and the military, then Steve does too. For a soldier himself, he’s always had a massive authority problem. One of his first acts as actual Captain America (as opposed to a stage actor with superpowers) was to disregard the chain of military command. He and Natasha leaked classified federal intelligence secrets, an act that’s sent less famous and powerful members of the military to places even worse than the Raft. And the Accords were, in a lot of ways, about formalizing the enhanced people of the world into something like a military.

Given how UN peacekeeping operations tend to go down—or never arrive at all, as the case may be—Tony gets the reluctance and lack of enthusiasm, he really does. But if you’re looking for a villain as black-and-white as honest-to-god Nazis, Tony thinks that genocidal robots and invading alien armies should qualify, and that’s the sort of thing the Accords were created to fight.

The point is, Tony’s not really sure how he, noted hedonist and not-a-team-player, ended up on the side of accountability and chain of command, and Steve Rogers, team leader and actually-a-Captain-in-the-US-Army, on the side of laissez-faire superheroing.

 

_________

####  **Gay**

 

He calls himself bisexual, because that's the closest approximation to what he is. (Pan makes him think of goat legs and reed pipes, and he’s gotten the idea that “queer” isn’t a word that middle aged cisgender white men should really call themselves, no matter how much he loves taking it up the ass.) He’s still been called gay repeatedly, by tabloids usually, which don’t understand the nuances of language or identity. Howard, of course, called him that, and a lot worse.

The way Tony thinks about it is that he likes people, not genders. He’d liked Tiberius not because he was a man, but because of the way he smiled at Tony through his black framed glasses, like Tony mattered. Because of the late-night talks they’d shared those first few weeks, when everything was tentative and gentle. Because Tony was used to hearing the people who were supposed to care about him telling them it was all his fault for not loving them enough, not being good enough, for being too loud, too withholding, too needy, too distant, so the idea of Ty caring about him fit together with everything he knew.

He’d liked Pepper not because she was a woman, but because of her poise, her teasing, her sense of self. How effortlessly she said no to him. How she always said her piece, held him accountable, even when he was being an ass. She’d watched him before he’d figured out how to be a decent human being. She knew every crass line and biting comment and one-night-stand and drunken hookup he’d made, and she stuck around anyway. Before Pepper, only Rhodey did that, and he probably only managed it by spending so much of his time deployed overseas. And she’s so clever, so smart; not the way he is, not about as many things, maybe, but better. She understands people, corporations, executive decisions, boundaries. She understands him. She’s the only one he’d trust to run his company, and one of the few people he’d ever trust to boss him around.

Of course, the other person he’s trusted to boss him around is Steve.

He’d wanted Steve because Steve was _Steve_. Good and true and solid. (And perfectly shaped, like an idealized Renaissance warrior carved out of a flawless seam of stone, with a face that Michelangelo and Leonardo would have gotten in a catfight over.) Not because Steve was a man—in fact, the gender part seemed pretty inconvenient at the very beginning, taking into account the 1930’s mentality and all. (That was before Barnes came back, of course, and Tony learned that the reason he didn’t deserve Steve Rogers was, as always, that he wasn’t good enough, rather than what’s between his legs.)

 

_________

 

####  **A good listener**

 

Most of the time when people talk to him, they’re saying something Tony already knows. So he’s gotten into the habit of ignoring most of it. The unfortunate side effect of this is that he sometimes ends up missing actually important information that people are trying to give him.

The first time Rhodey talked to him about Steve, he’d said, “You know that just because he’s a dude doesn’t mean Steve is just like Ty, right?”

Tony had said, “Well, that’s random. Cap’s got nothing in common with Ty. Other than being blond, I guess,” and started telling a story about the business trip to London he’d just returned from.

A few months after that, Tony and Pepper had been on a cruise ship for some god awful reason, and they were yelling at each other, and Pepper said—or yelled—“Of course you’re busy. I used to manage your schedule. I know exactly how busy you are. But you always, _always_ make time for the things that you _want_ to do, so what am I supposed to think when I don’t see you for weeks, Tony?” At the time, Tony had thought it meant that they were _both_ busy people with conflicting schedules.

The next time he and Rhodey discussed Steve, it was during one of Tony’s longer off-again times with Pepper. They were in the Tower garage working on the Ghia Cadillac, and Tony brought it up. “I think Steve wants to have sex with me.”

Rhodey fixed him with a _look_. “Is that right. And you?”

Tony shrugged. “He’s hot. Kind of a dick, but. It could be fun.” Tony paused to reconnect the fuel injector to a cylinder. “Could help clear the air between us, even.”

“Yeah?” They fiddled in silence for a moment. “Is that what you’d hope to get out of hooking up with Steve?”

“I was thinking more about mind-blowing orgasms and super-soldier stamina.”

“Oh, of course,” Rhodey agreed. “Do you want to clear the air between you guys?”

“I think for that to happen, he’d need to stop being such an ass all the time, which seems unlikely.”

“Is that what it’d take, huh,” Rhodey teased.

“You’re surely not suggesting _I_ have any culpability in the matter.”

“Heaven forbid. Hand me the torque wrench.”

Sometimes Tony thinks he knows what Rhodey was trying to suggest to him that day; other times, not so much. He’s not about to ask, though. It’s less relevant than ever, these days.

Once, sometime after the second time Steve had come up to the penthouse to fuck, Rhodey finished recounting his latest date with a woman named Carol and asked, “How’d you figure out you wanted something serious with Pepper?”

Rhodey usually let Tony be the one to mention her first, but they were meeting up that weekend to talk, and Tony was feeling cautiously hopeful about the whole thing. “I realized I wanted to wake up next to her every morning.” Tony hadn’t realized until years later that—just as Pepper had accused him—he rarely took the time to actually do so.

A few weeks after everything with Ultron, Tony and Rhodey were hanging in DC, and an argument about deep dish versus New York style pizza somehow turned the subject to Steve.

“You gotta stop being so hard on yourself, Tones.”

“I made a killer robot. I think some self-flagellation is appropriate in this case,” Tony argued.

“You were mind-controlled,” Rhodey said, resolute.

“Still made a killer robot,” Tony pointed out. “And lied about it to my teammates. Former teammates.”

“Okay, that right there—”

“What? What?” Tony asked, affronted.

“I’m an Avenger now you know, and I know Steve Rogers’ handiwork when I hear it.” Tony scowled at that. “Tony,” Rhodey plowed on. “Why do you take everything that guy says to you so damn hard?”

“I don’t give a fuck what he thinks of me,” Tony said automatically. “I just know when I’ve fucked up. And the body count in Sokovia says I’ve fucked up. Big time.”

“Ultron’s responsible for those people’s deaths, not you.”

“And who’s responsible for Ultron?”

“That stupid magic rock, the way I understand it,” Rhodey said. “That’s how Maximoff explained it, anyway.”

“She said that, really?” Tony took a moment to be astonished. “Anyway, you know I don’t care what other people think about me.”

“You seem to care a lot about what Cap thinks about you.”

“Well, good thing he’s not my team leader anymore, then.”

But as usual, Rhodey had been right. Steve is Tony's blind spot, and it's fucking him over to this very day.

 

_________

####  **Optimist**

 

Hahahaha! Oh. Seriously?

That’s a cute idea.

 

_________

####  **Pessimist**

 

You can’t let shitty people define you and ruin your life and your outlook and objectivity, okay.

The word you're looking for is _futurist_ , darling. (Not the Boccioni kind.)

 

_________

####  **Victim**

 

Tony’s not defined by the things other people have done to him. So he’s not a victim, not of child abuse, intimate partner violence or domestic violence or whatever you wanna call it, or kidnapping. Not of Stane, of Loki or Killian or Zemo, not of Captain fucking America.

He makes his own choices. He’s Iron Man.

 

_________

 

####  **A good correspondent**

 

Tony’s fine at writing letters or emails, composing texts, talking on the phone. When he gets around to it.

It’s just that he has so many other things to do and keep track of, and then, when he gets a letter or an email or whatever from someone who he actually wants to like him, part of him always thinks, _They don’t really want to hear from me, they only contacted me because_ I _contacted_ them, _and it’s just this loop of obligation and…_ and he lets himself procrastinate. Even when he knows better, like with Harley. (When it’s from someone who he doesn’t care about, it’s even easier to not respond. Or to have Friday come up with a suitably dismissive reply.)

Tony does a little better with texting, if he’s at home and not too distracted when he gets a message. He’s great at multitasking anyway, and Friday takes his dictation to reply.

When he gets back from Siberia, he finds that Harley texted him sometime right after the airport battle in Leipzig. Now that he’s finally seen it, Tony texts back right away.

 

 **Harley:** _I saw you on the news_ _  
_ **Harley:** _are you ok_

 **Tony:** _always_

 **Harley:** _you covered your ass?_

 **Tony:** _smart guys always do, and I’m a smart guy_

 **Harley:** _are you going to go completely mental again?_

 **Tony:** _probably_ __  
**Tony:** _but I’ll be okay_ __  
**Tony:** _school’s almost out, right?_ __  
**Tony:** _come visit me in NY sometime this summer_ __  
**Tony:** _I’ll buy you a plane ticket of course_ __  
**Tony:** _we’ll do a thing, it’ll be great_ __  
  


A lot of times Harley will just text him photos of what he’s working on: the computer he’s building; the noise-making device he’s putting together from old handheld video game parts; the rubber band launcher; the fighting lego robot he’s entering in a competition. So Tony sends him photos of what he’s working on too: the engine for an arc reactor powered car; another prototype prosthesis for Rhodey; a training course for Natasha that might actually challenge her gymnastics skills; specs for an Iron Man suit that can breach atmosphere; schematics for a robotic arm prosthesis because why not, it turns out prosthetics are a lot of fun, no other reason.

Pepper has long since mastered the art of getting Tony to reply to business-related correspondence, and that’s through a combination of persistence and clear labeling. Her emails include helpful tags that indicate “you have to actually read this but don’t need to respond,” “you can skim this,” “I just need to have a record that this was sent to you,” “if you build this by X date you don’t need to answer this email,” “if you don’t answer this question in Y amount of time I’m going to decide on my own,” and so on. She applies the same tactics to personal exchanges as well, which is why Pepper had flown to New York to break up with him in person, as well as part of how she’d once ended up on a two-week romantic vacation to Hawaii by herself.

Then there’s Peter, and those voicemails he leaves for Happy. Tony listens to all of them, obviously, but the kid’s doing good on his own, so Tony doesn’t really feel the need to reply.

Later, after the ferry and then moving day, he realizes that maybe he should’ve.

As for that holier-than-thou letter from Steve. Tony had gotten as far as _Hopefully one day you can understand_ before he decided he wasn’t going to write back. Definitely not in the form of a hard-copy letter.

He’d reconsidered, briefly, at _if you need me_.

The letter ended up in the incinerator, but Tony had already memorized the whole thing, sanctimoniousness and all.

And then there was the phone. Steve must’ve known it was impossible for Tony to ignore something like that. That was, in fact, probably the point. He could tell himself all he wanted that he’d never _need_ Steve; he had things covered. But what if Steve needed _him_? So he kept the stupid thing, insult to contemporary technology that it was.

 

_________

 

####  **A good friend**

 

If he were good at being a friend, he’d have friends who weren’t, however distantly, on his payroll. Pepper had started as his assistant and was still his CEO. Happy was his driver and bodyguard and then head of security. Rhodey had the gig as SI liaison with the military’s Department of Acquisitions, and then Tony had gotten him that consulting spot at SHIELD, and then SHIELD fell, and he was War Machine with the Avengers—which, of course, Tony was funding. And the Avengers, well. They still fell apart, money and all.

If he were a good friend, Happy wouldn’t have almost died. Bruce wouldn’t have decided that his best choice was to up and fuck off of the _entire planet_. Pepper wouldn’t give him that look like she's trying not to cry. He wouldn’t hear secondhand from board members that she was late to a meeting each time Iron Man was called out last month. (Pepper was never late for meetings, or anything else, until him.) If he were a good friend, Rhodey would never have fallen. JARVIS would still be around, or Tony would at least know how to have a conversation with Vision. (Tony’s pretty sure that Vision intentionally seeks him out in the early mornings, when Tony has the excuse of under-caffeination to be taciturn and inattentive.)

Yinsen would still be alive. (Even if Tony weren’t.)

If he were a good friend, Steve would’ve trusted him with the truth. Would have asked for his help. So.

 

_________

####  **Hypocrite**

 

Okay. So. This one might be debatable.

But he really tries, okay?

He does his research. The timing was so perfect for everything to go to shit. It just didn’t sit right with him.

In the end, Tony can’t actually place Zemo himself at Peggy Carter’s nursing home; security footage and traffic cams show him visibly out of the country, in fact. There’s no damning video footage of murder taking place, for this one. But it’s definitely a murder.

Tony does think, briefly, _Maybe he’s better off not knowing_. But he knows that’s never true.

Plus, it’s not like their relationship could get worse or anything.

He carries the stupid flip phone with him. (Not because it’s comforting to know it’s there. Nothing so sentimental. Of course not. It’s practicality.) He texts Steve.

 

 **Tony:** _hey_ __  
**Tony:** _not an emergency._ __  
**Tony:** _I have some information you’re gonna want_ _  
_ **Tony:** _where can I send it?_

 

Steve replies half an hour later with an email address. Tony doesn’t have to look far to see that it’s secure, and that someone in Wakanda—someone very, very good at encryption, probably Shuri—set it up. Before Tony can send the files, Steve texts again.

 

 **Steve:** _Tony_ _  
_ **Steve:** _it doesn’t have to be an emergency for us to talk_

 

Tony doesn’t reply.

He sends Steve the files he’s found from the nursing home, the toxicity reports that were buried, the records of switched dosages that got covered up. The bank records showing money moving from account to account, finally reaching various staff who’d looked after Peggy, all tracing back to Zemo.

In his email, Tony writes:

 

_He wanted you as off-balance as possible._

 

He almost writes _vulnerable_ , but thinks better of it. That’s too much like implying that Steve’s a victim of Zemo’s bullshit. As far as Tony’s concerned, Steve’s responsible for his own actions—and if Steve’s a victim, that suggest Tony is, too. There were people and circumstances working against them, sure, but they’re still their own people.

He almost writes, _She deserved a better death than being murdered to upset you,_ but he figures that goes without saying.

Tony writes, but then deletes:

 

_I wish I’d asked you if you wanted me to come to the funeral with you instead of assuming you didn’t._

 

Instead, he writes:

 

_I’m sorry for your loss. She was a great woman. She was tough, and should have had years of life left._

_I’m passing these files along to her niece as well._

 

Tony sends the email.  

He realizes a few hours later that it was Steve’s birthday. If you’d asked him, “When is Captain America’s birthday?” of course he could have recited to you that it’s the goddamn 4th of July because _what even is Steve’s life_. But if—even, say, two months ago, before the shit with the Accords even started—you’d asked him, “Is Steve’s birthday soon?” Tony would have had no idea. He’s fine at history, not so great at birthdays. They don’t seem important enough to commit to memory.

Now, when he’s staring out of the window at the red, white, and blue fireworks—strontium, titanium, and copper halides exploding over the skyline—he thinks that maybe if he’d remembered, he would have waited a day to let Steve know. So he wouldn’t have to be burdened by that on his birthday, of all days. But even the day after a birthday seems harsh, and then it’s just a slippery slope to _He’s better off not knowing,_ and Tony _isn’t_ a hypocrite. He isn’t. So. It’s better that he’s just told Steve already, birthday be damned.

A day later, Steve texts.

 

 **Steve:** _Thank you for telling me_

 

Tony doesn’t reply.

 

_________

 

####  **Know-it-all**

 

Tony doesn’t go around thinking that he’s always right, or that he’s smarter than everyone. He’s just smarter than _most_ people, and he’s _usually_ right.

He’s painfully aware of the times he was wrong. Building weapons. Trusting Obie. Thinking he could take on anything, anyone. Believing in the Avengers, that he could be a part of a team like that. Thinking he could make it work with Pepper. Thinking he knew what he was doing with Peter. Trusting Steve, apparently.

Meeting people smarter than he is can be a breath of fresh air, to be honest.

When T’Challa had introduced Tony to his sister Shuri over a video call, he’d felt like he was starting to understand what other people were talking about when they had religious epiphanies. She’d showed him how she constructed T’Challa’s nanotech Black Panther suit and it was so perfect and clever he’d wanted to cry. He might have gotten there eventually on his own, if he’d had a few years of working on nothing else, and even then it wouldn’t have been as elegant. The world could do with more people who are as much smarter than Tony as Shuri is.

It’s nice to get a break sometimes, is what it comes down to. He’d rather let Steve handle tactics, Bruce genetics and biology, Dr. Cho medicine, Pepper business, and all of that, than expend any effort pretending he’s half as good at those things as they are.

Recognizing his own limitations is part of his genius, Tony figures.

Because it’s one thing to fear failure, it’s another thing not to do anything about it. Justin Hammer fears failure and he lets it stop him. As soon as it looks like he’s succeeded, he figures he has. Tony prefers to keep testing every possible way he might have failed until he’s made something as close to perfect as he possibly can.

Hammer’s always rushing, finding shortcuts, being satisfied with pale imitations of Tony’s tech. Of Tony’s everything, it sometimes seemed—his fast talking, his gregariousness, his chatter, his charm, his sass. It can feel like Hammer’s a twisted caricature of Tony from a decade ago, always ten steps (or more) behind, always sniffing for Tony’s scraps.

With one notable exception. Tony may have a thriving multi-billion-dollar tech company, be revolutionizing the fields of green energy and mobile computing and robotics and artificial intelligence and medical prosthetics, be making the covers of magazines shooting for down terrorists and catching civilians from exploding airplanes. But he was also recently beaten to shit by his colleague and former fuck-buddy, was dumped by the only woman who could probably ever stand to date him for any period of time, was once again betrayed and lied to and publicly blamed for the dissolution of the Avengers.

Meanwhile, Hammer is coasting as much one can while living behind bars in Seagate Prison: he’s actually _found_ _love_. Tony first found out when some TV station had interviewed Hammer about Trevor Slatterly—he wasn’t keeping tabs on Hammer, far from it—and then when Tony had given testimony for Hammer’s parole hearing a few months ago, there Justin was, still dating the same guy from that stupid documentary on the Mandarin. Yeah, Hammer’s still batshit and an idiot and the guy he’s been dating all these years is incarcerated alongside him, but damn if it doesn’t rankle that he’s got romantic stability and Tony’s got a big empty compound where earth’s mightiest heroes used to live. How is it that there’s someone out there who can put up with Hammer’s brand of idiocy and egomania but not Tony’s?

Then again. How does that Groucho Marx quotation go? _I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member._

That sounds about right. Anyone dumb enough to get with Tony right now isn’t smart enough to be his type.

 

_________

 

####  **Obsessive compulsive**

 

It’s not obsessive okay, and it’s not _really_ a compulsion, Tony just doesn’t like being handed things. And it’s not a problem, it doesn’t prevent him from living his life the way he wants, so it doesn’t matter. It’s just a thing he has. Everyone has things like that, probably. Or maybe some people don’t, healthy people, normal people, whatever, but it doesn’t cause him any problems, so who cares.

It’s not a logical thing, that much is true. He doesn’t think someone is just going to pass him a bomb or a letter full of anthrax or anything like that. There’s no rational reason that something that feels unsafe in someone’s hand can feel safe when it’s set on the table next to him instead. There will be something in someone’s hand, thrust toward him, and he can’t take it, he _can’t_ , his whole body feels screwed on wrong just thinking about it, like everything has rotated just 45 degrees to one side and he has to twist to make everything line up right. It’s just one of those things. Like how Pepper needs to arrange sticky notes or signature flags on documents so that they’re staggered perfectly in a stepladder down the fore-edge of the stack. Or like how Rhodey regularly flies into battle zones without a thought but absolutely cannot stand even contemplating rats or their little naked tails—to the point where Tony doesn’t even tease him about it, just has Friday learn all of JARVIS’ old protocols about blocking images, articles, and scenes in TV shows and movies that feature rats prominently.

He remembers a night in his workshop at the tower, working on repulsor engines for the helicarriers while Steve filled out mission reports on the couch, just a couple months after the battle of New York. DUM-E rolled over with a smoothie, setting down in the midst of the holograms he’d been working on, casting blue and white beams of light across the ceiling.

Seeing Steve watching him, Tony glared and said, “I just don’t like being handed things.”

“Okay,” Steve replied.

“It’s not a problem in battle situations. I have it under control.”

“I get it.”

“Sure you do, Cap.”

“Really. I mean, it’s not the same. But I think everyone has something like that. Some people’s are just bigger than others.”

“Oh yeah? What’s Captain America’s weird compulsion, then?”

Steve shrugged. “Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I take out my shield and crawl into bed with it.”

“That’s not that weird.”

“It’s a piece of metal. It’s kinda weird, Tony.”

“Well, it sounds comforting.”

A couple hours later, he’d managed to say, “Hey, Steve? Thanks for telling me that about the shield.”

Tony hadn’t remembered that, hadn’t been thinking of it when he’d asked for it back— _That shield doesn't belong to you. You don't deserve it. My father made that shield!_ —that day in the snow, with the concrete pillars, with the dead super-soldiers in their glass tanks, the video of that familiar stretch of road.

So he doesn’t remember it now. Or at least, he doesn’t let himself think about it.

Well. If Steve can’t sleep, if he’s having nightmares. Then so is Tony, and maybe it’s fair that he doesn’t have his comfort vibranium to clutch to his chest, after how many times he rammed it into Tony’s.

 

_________

 

####  **Alone**

 

Being lonely isn't the same as being alone. He does have Pepper and Rhodey, whatever their reasons for sticking with him. And Happy, Friday, Vision, even Nat.

Pepper sends him postcards and snapshots from California and all her SI trips, even though she knows he’s never going to write her back (see above: a good correspondent). He’s even kept some of her postcards from museums and galleries. He got a print made of the photo of her in a pristine white linen pantsuit cuddling a midnight black Maine Coon at a cat cafe in Japan; she’s smiling and looking like it wouldn’t even occur to her to mind getting dark fur all over her couture. Tony hangs it on one of the screens in his office.

Rhodey stays at the compound whenever he can, bringing bits of New York City (donuts from that place on Ninth, bagels from somewhere in Brooklyn that he claims has the most authentic recipe in the world, and one time a loaf of quinoa bread that Peter’s hot aunt baked for him when he stopped by Queens). Vision has mostly figured out how to make coffee properly—how he manages to get it wrong on occasion when there are profiles programmed into the coffeemaker, Tony will never know—and will sit with Tony in the early mornings when he’s up and dressed and showered before dawn for work and meetings, sipping from a mug of his own and leaving Tony wondering about whether the android has a gastrointestinal tract or what. When Happy is around, they watch “The Great British Baking Show.” (Vision tried—with moderate success—to prepare a beef wellington after joining them for an afternoon.)

After Tony sends Steve the files on Peggy’s death, Steve starts sending him emails, using the secure system they have in place. Most of them come a day or so after news has broken of a sighting of the rogue Avengers, and contain only slightly-censored mission reports from their international outings. On the one hand, it seems like the least he can do to keep Tony in the loop at this point, on the other, it’s a shocking—and confusing—display of trust. There’s enough in the files for him to help involve authorities and Accords-approved agents in the cleanup and aftermath, which means there’s enough that Tony could trace their team and predict their next targets, if he really wanted to.

He receives a chemical breakdown of a mind-control drug they intercepted in Hanoi, schematics for Chitauri-inspired armed drones pulled off of Hydra servers in Bogota, and an analysis from Scott Lang on a techno-organic virus that was being developed by a computer-worshipping cult in Cape Town. Tony finally replies with a _Thanks_ after receiving a shockingly thorough report from Clint on some stolen Stark Industries weapons—years old, of course, but still better than what anyone else is churning out these days—that he’d tracked to Mexico City.

Perhaps emboldened by the reciprocation (however minimal), Steve starts sending text messages after that.

 

 **Steve:** _thanks for your help with the Raft_

 

Tony didn’t do much, he only wiped the security footage from the breakout. He’s sure that some of T’Challa’s people were going to handle it, he’d just gotten there first. After a few days of stewing on that, of opening the phone and looking at the text and then closing it again, Tony writes back.

 

 **Tony:** _believe it or not I didn’t want our friends stuck in illegal solitary confinement for the rest of their lives, either_ _  
_ **Tony:** _doesn’t mean I’m not fucking furious_  

 **Steve:** _I know that_ _  
_ **Steve:** _I understand why you are_

 **Tony:** _…okay, I’m ready_

 **Steve:** _what?_ _  
_ **Steve:** _what are you ready for?_

 **Tony:** _the captain america speech about how you’re angry too_ __  
**Tony:** _how wrong I am, what an asshole I am, etc._ _  
_ **Tony:** _curtailing freedom, police state, blah blah blah_

 **Steve:** _sounds like you already know it_

 

Steve keeps texting, after that. Tony always gives himself at least an hour to respond. Not just because he keeps typing things out and then deleting them, and definitely not because he wants to avoid the impression that he’s just sitting around waiting to hear from Steve.

 

 **Steve:** _Bucky’s in cryo now_

 **Tony:** _I know_

 **Steve:** _is that all you have to say?_

 **Tony:** _this is gonna be good_ __  
**Tony:** _tell me_ _  
_ **Tony:** _what is it you expect me to say to that?_

 **Steve:** _that it’s not any different than what would’ve happened if we’d just gone to the UN_

 **Tony:** _wow_ _  
_ **Tony:** _you think I’ve turned into a bureaucrat_

 **Steve:** _jesus, I wasn’t trying to insult you or something_ __  
**Steve:** _I just want you to know everything that’s going on_ _  
_ **Steve:** _you deserve that_

 

Each time Tony goes days without responding, Steve still texts him. But instead of asking why he hasn’t heard from him, repeating his last message or elaborating on it, or anything like that, he sends photos. The first is of a sunset: jagged eggplant-colored clouds with mauve and heather highlights that make the sky look like shards of amethyst. Later he gets a picture of Clint practicing with some kind of Wakandan energy weapon, something like Chewbacca’s bowcaster, a phaser, and a classic bow and arrow rolled into one. There’s photos of Steve’s sketchbook, of Lang shrunk down and napping on Wanda’s shoulder, of Wilson reading against an acacia tree.

Of everyone in Tony’s life, Nat is around the most, and in contact the most, because she’s working directly with him on everything that’s going on. Since she maintains an even lower affect than Vision, though, it’s easy to feel alone even when she’s going over paperwork in the same room as him.

Still. It’s nice knowing she has his back.

 

_________

 

####  **A hot mess**

 

Okay, the level to which Tony might, or might not, be a hot mess is subjective and debatable; but the point is, he’s _less_ of a hot mess than he used to be. Or than he could be. That’s gotta count for something.

For all that he fucks up and has his bad days, he’s not the worst, as patients of psychology go. It took him a few years after Afghanistan to start therapy—okay, it took until after Killian and Extremis to start therapy—but it helped. Well, once he found a good therapist, it helped. That had involved months of trial and error and at least two lawsuits about doctor-patient confidentiality. (Yeah, that did wonders for his trust issues.)

Tony never found the _right_ therapist, exactly, but he had one he could stand on each coast, and he absorbed the tools they gave him like a sponge. Keeping appointments and trusting strangers aren’t really his thing, but if there’s one thing he knows, it’s how to grab the basics of a discipline and go running with them on his own.

It started with dreams. He’s had troubling dreams since long before he became Iron Man.

Mostly they were the typical motifs: teeth falling out, being chased, trying to drive a car with no steering or breaks or gas. After the first time he’d been kidnapped for ransom—he was 6 years old, he thinks, the time when he was 4 doesn’t really count and didn’t make much of an impact on his psyche—he had dreams about strangers arriving in matte black cars to pick him up from school. (Those weren’t always bad dreams, though.)

At any rate, dreaming has long seemed to him to be just another skill to master. First he learned how to reliably tell when he was dreaming. Once he could reliably do that, he started waking himself up whenever a dream turned toward disturbing imagery. But that didn’t really resolve anything; he’d just be lying in bed, awake, cycling through what he’d just dreamed, living it except now he knew he was really awake.

What was better was when he learned to change what happened in the dreams. Dreams follow their own internal logic, one he hasn’t fully mastered, but he can still make some improvements. He can’t steer a car that doesn’t have a wheel, but he can aim it off a cliff and jump out the sunroof into flight. If he’s running down an endless hallway, he can’t turn it into a scene of a topless party on a yacht, but he can make a door appear and go through it to something less dreadful.

Dreams taught him that the brain is just another system to master. A complicated, organic, messy system that no one fully understands, where the rules are constantly changing. But at least there’s some handbooks and people trying to become experts.

It all got trickier after Afghanistan—what didn’t. It wasn’t long, though, before most of his nightmares resolved into him literally building the Iron Man suit in his sleep. From there he got the idea of calling the suit to assemble around him remotely, using a gesture or specific brainwave, and then he was actually calling the suit to him in his sleep, too. (Much to Pepper’s dismay.) The problem is that bad things don’t stop once he’s Iron Man, whether he’s awake or not. When he dreams about Obadiah taking the arc reactor out of his chest—though in his dreams it’s his flesh, still-beating heart, because his unconscious isn’t subtle—he’s not paralyzed—he stands, grabs it back, asks him, “What happened? Was the money that important?” And then the dream takes control again and they’re both in the armor and Obie is falling, and sometimes Tony’s falling too, and even asleep he can’t seem to take flight.

Some dreams can’t really be improved, no matter how much he alters them. If he dreams that Vanko flattens a car with Pepper and Happy inside of it, it doesn’t really help, necessarily, for them to reappear, fine and whole—he still saw it happen, he still knows how close it was to really happening, how little he’d been able to do to stop it. If he dreams that the missile soaring over Manhattan explodes into harmless fireworks, he still knows that the Chitauri army is out there, still knows they’re already on their way.

It’s not enough to put a bandaid on a bad experience or fear. A patch job only lasts so long before the real problem breaks everything down again. What really works is if the memory is replaced by something different. Ideally something better, but anything to help process it, to help with moving on.

And that’s the idea behind the Binarily Augmented Retro-Framing prototype. (He’s still working on a new name, okay.) What’s the point of being disgustingly wealthy if not to indulge in some vanity projects, anyway?

He’s only used the system to relive the bunker in Siberia three times. That was plenty. The first time, Steve killed him—sunk his shield into his larynx, and that was it. The second, he killed both Steve and Barnes, one repulsor blast to the face each. The third time, Tony pulled the doors open and Steve made that relieved face he always did, said, “It’s good to see you Tony,” just like it really happened—but then he grabbed his hand and said, “Wait.” That time, they didn’t go any further into the bunker. They went back outside, through the snow, all the way to the jet.

So Tony hasn’t figured out how to make that one better, really, and he has more important things to occupy him. Still, he sends all his notes and research on the system to Shuri, along with everything the neurologists and cognitive scientists he’d been working with gave him. It’s probably information she already has, but it can’t hurt. Who knows, maybe it’ll help Barnes get out of cryo and get some of himself back sooner.

The evening after he sends his data to Wakanda, he gets a text message from Steve. (Well, first he gets a photo of a chunk of quartz washed up on a dark sandy beach, a pastel copy of a Wyeth painting of a window with lace curtains, and a snapshot of a Rhodesian ridgeback wagging its tail.)

 

 **Steve:** _I saw Natasha today_

 **Tony:** _okay_

 **Steve:** _I asked her how you’re doing and she said I should ask you_

 **Tony:** _okay_

 **Steve:** _how are you Tony?_

 **Tony:** _busy._

 

Tony vows to stop replying for at least the rest of the day after that, but he still checks each time the phone buzzes. He gets a picture of a bowl of pears, a turtle crossing a paved road, and a huge, violently red dragonfly.

That night, Tony dreams he’s walking up the mansion steps, down the halls, and into the library. He takes Captain America’s shield down from the shelf where it’s resting, and he can’t tell if he’s in his library or in his memory palace. He doesn’t think he put the shield in his memory palace; he doesn’t know what it would represent. But here it is, next to an Ernst Haeckel etching of radiolaria. He can feel the high wool pile of the rug under his bare toes. Finally he realizes he’s dreaming, but he doesn’t know what to change.

  


_________

 

####  **Lawyer**

 

For most of his life the study of law had mostly seemed, to Tony, a misapplication of the study of classics and the Latin language. He’s a big believer in delegation, and if there’s someone out there he can pay who not only knows and gives a shit about the law but also enjoys practicing it, he’s going to write that check and pass the legal buck onto them.

But now he’s the face of the Avengers in the United States and everyone is asking him about the Accords. Not just the press, either. He’s an advisor for fucking UN committees now. He has meetings with members of Congress and UN delegates and with honest-to-god ambassadors. Sure, that’s sort of what he’d wanted, back when the Accords were first passed—for the Avengers to work to revise them and make them something actually close to functional. But he hadn’t meant _him_.

So Natasha is his legal buddy now. (She knew more about the law than the minimum she’d needed to pass her tests as a California Notary Public for her Natalie Rushman cover. Which wasn’t saying much, but. She also knew a lot more about international law than Tony, which again, was saying almost nothing. Still, she knew _people_ , and was superb at saying what they wanted to hear.) At all the meetings, hearings, committees, and press conferences, she’s with him. She’s there, not just as a physical presence, but also to translate the legalese and bureaucratic gibberish into something actionable.

Now Steve’s not the only one sending regular emails to the semi-secret account Tony set up to send him the files on Peggy. He’s getting notes on their recent press conferences and suggestions for improvements to the Accords from Clint, Lang, Wilson, and Wanda. (Clint only sends one vitriolic email about what a jerk Tony is and how he should have told them all about the Accords months earlier and on and on in that vein. Tony had expected a lot more of that though, all things considered.) T’Challa uses it sometimes too—when he’s not occupied with his own mission to revise the Accords into something his father would be proud of—keeping Tony apprised of all the changes happening as Wakanda takes the international stage, including details that can’t be communicated through official channels.

Slowly, the Accords are changing. They’re working on separate contracts for different superhero types, groups, and individuals, so that no one is expected to go through the weeks of UN approval to fight bad guys in their own backyards. Only people who want to use their powers for law enforcement purposes have to get government oversight; anyone who wants to use their shapeshifting or healing powers or whatever else for party tricks or corporate negotiations is free to do so. They’ve written in protections for acting in self-defense, guidelines for time-sensitive emergencies, and the beginnings of an accountability system that isn’t equivalent to government-sanctioned stalking.

All in all—sexy assassin-lawyer sidekick aside—it’s not what Tony had ever expected to be part of Iron Man’s job.

 

_________

 

####  **Prescient**

 

It’s really annoying when Tony’s hard-earned skills are misattributed to nonsense and superstition.

Which is what it is when the press praises him as being _farsighted, prescient, visionary._ He studies patterns, he runs the data, extrapolates, makes predictions; it’s a science, not a talent. And as good as he is, he isn’t always right. He certainly doesn’t _literally_ know what’s going to happen before it does, like a Jedi seeing how his enemy will move, or a seer reciting the prophecy of a Chosen One.

Clint’s accusation that Tony had known the Accords were coming, the insinuations that he’d been in on the planning, were especially obnoxious not just because they were untrue, but because they were nonsensical.

At the least the other parts had been cogent. It’s true that Bruce wouldn’t have been on Tony’s side. That’s not exactly a reasoned argument, but it sucks and yeah, it’s not fun to be reminded of. It’s not true that Tony was supporting Ross or liked him or anything like that, and Tony thinks highly enough of Bruce to believe that Bruce would have been able to see that, if he’d been on the planet at the time. If Clint can’t, that’s his problem. Clint’s other claims lacked evidence, but were still the sort of things that keep Tony up at night: did Peter have all the facts before he joined the fight; was Peter old enough to make his own decisions in the matter; was bringing Peter in putting the kid in danger. (Though, if the latter was really a problem, it would only be because Tony was putting too much trust in his former teammates to pull their punches.)

If Tony had been working on the Accords, he would have come up with something better. And he would’ve asked the rest of the Avengers for input from the get-go. (C’mon, he learned something after Ultron, okay.)

 

_________

 

####  **War profiteer**

 

Any more. Tony isn’t a war profiteer _any more_.

He does everything in his power not to be. To make up for it.

Which is why it really fucking rankles when, a week after Clint’s diatribe, Wanda Maximoff uses the secure email to write him and tell him that's all he’ll ever be.

He’s heard the story before. About the attack that killed her parents. About her and Pietro, 10 years old, waiting for the mortar shell to go off. The mortar shell with Tony’s name on it. But he hadn’t heard it straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak. He hadn't known it was Hannukah, that the family had been lighting the candles when the shelling started, that instead of lamp oil lasting 8 miraculous nights, it was two days of waiting for the non-exploding shell to go off and kill them.

 _I know,_ he wants to tell her. _It was my name. It was my name but it's not me._

(It was Barnes’ hand, his body that strangled Maria Stark. It had his face, but it was the Winter Soldier who killed Tony’s mom.)

Instead he texts Steve. Because Steve has just sent him a photo of a sweet potato and a drawing of a candelabra, and it makes Tony think of Hannukah in Sokovia.

 

 **Tony:** _so when can I expected an itemized list of thirty years of disagreements_

 **Steve:** _what?_

 **Tony:** _from you_ __  
**Tony:** _I got Clint’s and Wanda’s_ __  
**Tony:** _when do I get your Cap speech in written form_ __  
**Tony:** _detailing all of the ways that I’m wrong and bad and responsible for all the ills of the world_ _  
_ **Tony:** _I just want to make sure my schedule is clear so I can properly meditate on it_

 **Steve:** _I told them not to email you_ _  
_ **Steve:** _I know it’s pointless_

 **Tony:** _oh is that the problem with it_

 **Steve:** _what?_

 **Tony:** _I’m so reprehensible there’s no point in even talking to me, clearly_

 **Steve:** _I meant it isn’t helpful_ __  
**Steve:** _and I think someday they’re going to regret saying all of that to you_ __  
**Steve:** _I’m sure it’s upsetting too_ _  
_ **Steve:** _I’ll talk to them_

 **Tony:** _oh I get it_ __  
**Tony:** _it’s a problem when people don’t follow instructions_ __  
**Tony:** _if it’s YOU giving the orders_ _  
_ **Tony:** _if 117 countries agree on something, that’s fine to ignore though_

 **Steve:** _you’re clearly determined to turn whatever I say into something awful_ _  
_ **Steve:** _so I guess it doesn’t matter what I say at this point_

 **Tony:** _oh are you feeling ignored_ __  
**Tony:** _like no one’s listening to what you’re actually saying or what you actually do_ __  
**Tony:** _and just making assumptions instead_ _  
_ **Tony:** _I wonder what that feels like_

 

_________

 

####  **Politician**

 

No one would ever think to call Tony Stark _diplomatic_.

Yet here he is, involved in politics.

No surprise, this is another thing that Natasha is much better at this than he is.

She and Pepper help him start an education campaign for voters on the state of intelligence agencies and enhanced humans in the country, then another one on all the shady shit that Thaddeus Ross pulled. (It’s not long before Ross is forced to resign.) When there’s a ruckus in DC about requiring a Big-Brother-level of registration and licensing for anyone connected with trying any sort of hero-ing or anything beyond baseline human, they create a super PAC that’s working to protect the identities of good samaritans and enhanced people. (Ironically, prior to that, Tony’s only foray into PACs had been a series of anonymous donations to one that supported campaign finance reform and overturning _Citizens United_.) Tony shows up on time and delivers speeches in front of actual government bodies and international groups, and mostly sticks to his script because Natasha wrote it and what the fuck else is he going to do. He calls people asshats a lot less than he wants to, which sucks, but not as much as it would for more good people to end up on the Raft, so.

When they’re at a press conference and someone asks Tony why the licensed Avengers line still produces Captain America, Hawkeye, Falcon, and Scarlet Witch figures and accessories, Natasha takes over with a smooth reply about manufacturing timelines, supply lines to distributors, and product turnover. (Tony would’ve probably ended up making a snide comment about the fun of getting rich—well, richer—off of pro-Accords extremists burning his friends in effigy.) He tries to return the favor by answering the question about whether the Hulk was kicked off of the team prior to the so-called “Civil War” for being a murderer.

Natasha’s notes from all the meetings they get shunted off to include not only the things that people literally said (which any transcription device could manage) but also her translation into what they were actually thinking at the time, which is infinitely more valuable. She’d been the one to figure out that the Bengali delegate was actually working with the one from Peru, and once she’d caught on that the annoying brigadier general was having an affair, it’d been easy to find the evidence online and get him off the committee.

With Natasha on board, it only takes a few months for Clint to be pardoned and given an open invitation to return to the States whenever he wants, and not much longer after that to sort out Lang’s situation. Neither is perfect, but it’s a start. Getting Steve and Wilson permission to come home is going to be a lot more complicated, and Lang’s a parolee. They’ve barely even scratched the surface of what it’ll take to get Wanda, who isn’t a US citizen, clear to enter the country again, let alone to get Barnes on the side of the law. But it’s a start.

The more prominent his involvement becomes, the more text messages Tony gets from Steve.

 

 **Steve:** _you’re trying to clear Bucky’s name_

 **Tony:** _I’m letting people know the truth about what happened._

 **Steve:** _that’s not how you saw it before_

 **Tony:** _if you mean in Siberia_ _  
_ **Tony:** _actually if that’s what you mean then fuck you_

 **Steve:** _that’s not what I meant_

 **Tony:** _wtf did you mean then_ __  
**Tony:** _when am I supposed to have seen it differently if not then?_ __  
**Tony:** _christ_ __  
**Tony:** _it’s not that I’m not sorry I tried to murder your boyfriend okay_ __  
**Tony:** _it’s that you don’t seem sorry about lying to me_ _  
_ **Tony:** _after all the shit you gave me about hiding things from my teammates_

 **Steve:** _I really don’t know what I’m supposed to say to that_

 **Tony:** _how about you say what you’re thinking because I have no clue what that is_

 **Steve:** _I said I was sorry_

 **Tony:** _do you hear how childish you sound?_ __  
**Tony:** _you said you were sorry that I was hurt_ _  
_ **Tony:** _that’s not a real apology_

 **Steve:** _I’m sorry_ __  
**Steve:** _for not telling you_ _  
_ **Steve:** _for everything_

 

Tony turns the phone off and keeps it in a shoebox in his closet for three days after that.

When he turns it on again, Steve’s sent him a photo of a woman riding a rhinoceros, a pastel drawing of a mountain range, a sketch of the New York skyline, and a watercolor palette swirling with daubs of pigment.

 

 **Tony:** _I’m trying to clear him because it’s the right thing to do_ _  
_ **Tony:** _doesn’t mean I forgive him_

 **Steve:** _no one expects you to forgive something like that_

 **Tony:** _but you want me to_ _  
_ **Tony:** _don’t you_

 **Steve:** _it would be easier for me if you could_ __  
**Steve:** _that doesn’t mean it’s fair to ask of you_ __  
**Steve:** _I’m sorry that it sounded like I was surprised that you’re working to help him_ __  
**Steve:** _because I’m grateful_ __  
**Steve:** _we’re never going to agree entirely on the Accords_ __  
**Steve:** _I wish we could_ __  
**Steve:** _but I’m glad you’re working to make them better_ _  
_ **Steve:** _and to make things better for Bucky_

 

And that’s Tony’s job now, apparently. Working to make the Accords into something Steve can tolerate, and to make things better for Bucky goddam Barnes.

 

_________

####  **Father**

 

JARVIS never called him a father. Even Ultron only implied it and that was probably just to piss him off. (It worked.) Vision is still figuring out “feelings” and “being a person” and “having a body” and he’s blue and grew a cape out of his own back and every time he speaks he sounds just like Tony’s dead best friend—so okay, maybe he’s just never given Vision much of a chance to say it. But he wouldn’t. Tony’s sure of that.

All the paternity suits against him have been overturned. He’s a playboy, not an idiot, and even before Afghanistan, when overnight guests were his norm, he’d had a winning combination of common sense, condoms, and an army of lawyers, as well as private detectives who discreetly kept track of his guests’ medical visits. Plus, DNA testing. Conclusion: not the father. Not a father at all.

(If he's not a father at all, he can never be like _his_ father.)

 

_________

####  **Bad with kids**

 

That’s not to say he can’t hold his own with children, though. In small doses especially, he’s fucking _fantastic_ at it.

Kids love it when adults don’t bullshit them, and Tony’s not usually around long enough to have to deal with the consequences of his brand of honesty.

Kids love the armor, and explosions, and how Tony keeps Hershey’s kisses in a special compartment of every Iron Man suit.

It’s a cliche to say that kids are the future, but it’s one of those things that can be both completely trite and completely true. Tony just wants a future that’s as glittering and dazzling as kids get to imagine, as they deserve.

When Natasha passes along a photo of Lang being reunited with his daughter (and their creepy, law-of-conservation-of-mass-defying Shetland-pony-sized pet ant), Tony sends it to Steve. He figures Steve’s in better touch with Lang than Tony himself is, but it’s something he wants to share with Steve all the same.

He gets back a photo of an anteater eating a banana, a doodle of a toddler riding an ant, and a faded crayon drawing that Tony suspects is by Cassie Lang herself.

 

_________

####  **Eidetic**

 

Tony has a good memory, but it’s something that he’s had to work at. It’s not—like a lot of people maddeningly assume—as if being a genius means his brain is a computer and he can just pull up whatever information he pleases on a whim to reread it. He doesn’t have perfect recall, not naturally the way some people do. Having an incredible mind in one way doesn’t mean he’s also got a photographic memory—or has perfect pitch or is a mental calculator and so on. He’s not about to recite, from heart, the first paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of the seventh book of Pliny the Elder’s _Historia Naturalis_ or anything like that.

He was maybe 12 years old when he first read Luria’s _The Mind of a Mnemonist,_ which in turn had led him to Jorge Luis Borges’ “Funes the Memorious.” He’d quickly started fantasizing about being a synaesthete like Luria described Shereshevsky being, about using melded senses to retain information and make sense of the world. He’d dreamed of having the easy access to anything he’d seen or read before, an ability Tony was sure he would make much better use of than Borges’ fictional young Funes. Learning came easily to Tony, but memorizing less so, and the concept of not only keeping track of any knowledge presented to him but also of tasting numbers, smelling geometrical shapes, knowing the color of words, being able to feel non-Euclidean forms on his skin, of having all that extra data to analyze, was an alluring dream.

To compensate for his neuro-conformity in this matter, Tony researched memory techniques and tricks that could be mastered by anyone. He read _Rhetorica ad Herennium_ and learned to emulate the mental attic of Sherlock Holmes; Tony built his own memory palace. Well, _memory palace_ or _method of loci_ were the general terms for the process of memorizing the layout of a physical space made up of discrete locations—usually a building, or the arrangement of shops on a main thoroughfare, or any other physical space that the memorizer could picture well—committing each aspect of a memory to an item in that location, and then retrieving the memory-item by “walking” through the location. For Tony, it was more like a curio cabinet.

The expected thing to do would have been to use the mansion on Fifth Avenue where Tony had spent the majority of his childhood, but his access to that space was too limited to be of use as a mnemonic device. He hadn’t been allowed in Howard’s workshop or study, in his parents’ bedroom, in the servants’ quarters, in the laundry room or supply shed, or any other number of places. While he’d sneaked in wherever, whenever he could, he still didn’t have the intimate knowledge of the space required. Instead, he’d thought of the library, the place in the mansion that seemed next-best to his father’s workshop while having the benefit of being a place Howard never went. (Unlike the study, it didn’t have a wet bar and was much further away from the wine cellar than the workshop.)

The library was a primarily Victorian inspired affair, with dark wooden shelves stretching from the floor to the ceiling, which was painted with the lines and stars of constellations over an ultramarine sky. In one corner was a case with an entire human skeleton; in another, an antique telescope pointed at nothing. It was filled, too, with old-fashioned globes, hung with antique maps, lit by Tiffany lamps, and stuffed with objects of conspicuous scientific interest: bell jars of hummingbirds arranged in mid-flight; sextants and antique compasses; vials of wet specimens with tentacles and scales.

But the best part had been the cabinets of curiosities. Each item was labeled or tagged with a slip of yellowing paper and old twine, arranged by taxonomic rank. Every object fit precisely in its home, whether the perfectly sized square compartment of a drawer, a carved wooden compartment upholstered in felt, or the space left between a pinned scarab beetle and a chunk of honeycomb in a flat, glass-covered case. The rows of glass vials and jars looked, to Tony’s childhood mind, exactly the way a scientist’s workspace should. (This was an idea no doubt fueled, at least in part, by film adaptations of _Frankenstein._ )

So, when he wanted to remember a piece of information or something that had happened to him, he crystallized it into an object to be placed on a shelf or a section of a drawer, based on how it looked or felt or what numbers it involved: it could be a geode, smooth on the outside, with stalactites and stalagmites of data on the inside; or the molten, asymmetrical form of a _gongshi_ scholar’s rock, its craggy overhangs and eerie perforations a fractal form of the real-life landscape of the event; or a constructed skeleton of a cryptid, with antlers or saber-teeth, hooves or talons, bat wings or webbed feet or a prehensile tail to match the personality of the memory.

When he needed to access a recollection, it was a simple matter of going to his inner wunderkammer and taking out the relevant bird’s egg or lock of hair or chunk of quartz. He started simple, assigning objects and locations to the laws of thermodynamics, Newton's laws of motion, the speed of light, the atomic weights of most of the periodic table. In no time he’d memorized the plasticity, tensile strength, acoustical absorption, capacitance, and permittivity of his main building materials. Soon, taking in information that way became habit. Mounted by pins in neat rows were Planck’s constant, Avogadro’s number, Boltzmann’s constant. One drawer for Kirchhoff’s circuit laws, another for Fick’s laws of diffusion, one just for Pascal’s Law. A vial of Bernoulli’s principle, a jar of the Maxwell–Ampère equation, a beaker of the Schrödinger equation. Neatly hanging in little glass frames were Clifford's theorem, Faà di Bruno's formula, Pappus's centroid theorem. All of them findable by discipline and name and when and where he learned them, simple as plucking them off a shelf.

Now, when light and cheer often feel distant, he can open the mahogany doors of his mental curio case and find a memory of better times. The cloud-like sea fan coral that’s the same color as Pepper’s freckles, and he remembers the blissful week they spent in Saint-Tropez, when it felt like anything was possible. The open, gossamer wings of a Reakirt’s Blue butterfly with an abdomen that’s the same azure as Steve’s eyes, and he remembers the first kiss they shared together, a moment when he felt like _enough_. The shell of a chambered nautilus that Tony could hold up to his ear to fill it with the ocean-like echoes of his own blood pumping, and he hears Rhodey’s laugh, remembers a time before he’d failed to protect his closest and most loyal friend.

 

_________

####  **Forgetful**

 

Shereshevsky was, at times, desperate at his inability to forget certain things. Luria chronicled how he tried writing down the things he no longer wanted to remember onto slips of paper and burning them to ash. The memories persisted.

Tony doesn’t have to work to forget _some_ things—people’s names, birthdays, his social security number. Those, he doesn’t bother putting into his memory palace unless there’s a very good reason. It’s no effort to remove them and let his naturally mediocre recall take care of the rest.

Some small things, he’s not sure how they ended up in his memory in the first place, and no matter how useless they’ve become, they won’t leave. He knows what size clothes to pick up or keep on hand for Bruce after a surprise Hulk-out; what kind of pizza to order for Clint when he’s had a bad night thinking about Loki or Phil; which of Thor’s smiles mean _I'm pleased_ and which mean _I'm thinking about my brother and need to be distracted_. He still knows how Pepper likes her coffee (extra sweet, with caramel syrup and coconut milk). He still knows the names of Yinsen’s family (Dania, his wife, and their children, Houssam and Nasira). He still knows Steve’s favorite kind of bagel (sesame seed, especially from that one place in the fashion district).

And unfortunately, distress (Tony hates the word _trauma_ ) has built for him a memory house-of-horrors of all the events in his life he wishes he could forget.

The words “New York _”_ no longer send Tony _entirely_ back to an airless, silent void where he’s alone in the black with nothing but Chitauri ships, but it’s a close thing. With the arc reactor gone, a hand hovering near his sternum for a lingering second or two no longer brings a fully vivid flashback of Obie casually murdering him—but if it’s there for too long, Tony finds himself back on that couch in Malibu, slowly dying while Obadiah smiles to himself. And these days, it doesn’t take much—a snowbank that catches the light at the wrong angle, the silhouette of a broad figure that could be looming over him, concrete as dull and gray as a Soviet bunker—for Tony to be back in Siberia, sure that the next time Steve brings his shield down, it’ll be over Tony’s throat.

 

_________

####  **Idle**

 

Part of it is that he needs more than one project going at a time for anything to make sense. Ideally his workload would be something like: War Machine upgrades; retro-reflective paneling for the armor; debugging Friday’s new code; and reviewing schematics for an arc reactor power station. That way if he gets bored (or even stuck) on one, he can switch to the other, clear his mind for a bit, and get something productive done at the same time. Even if deadlines (which usually take the form of an increasing number of communications from Pepper) force him to work on only one actual, physical thing at a time, he can still break it down into interesting sub-projects. With the new StarkPads he’s supposed to be focusing on these days, there’s the backbone of the operating system itself, the voice recognition software, the privacy protocols, and the ad-blocking software to finish up, and that’s just on the software end; when he gets tired of those, he still has the guts and hardware to tinker with. There’s always the boring stuff, too, the SI meetings he can’t get out of, the charities and galas where he has to make a physical appearance, the inevitable travel time. It helps to have more interesting puzzles to occupy him during those times.

The problem is that these days it’s all of that plus new legs for Rhodey, trying to track down Bruce and Thor, preparing for the inevitable alien invasion—and that’s not to mention the work on the Accords and the pardons for the rogue team members, the meetings and press conferences and paperwork that accompany those, and the constant need to stand in front of cameras and microphones and deny any knowledge of or association with the Nomad vigilante.

He’s sitting in his office at the Avengers compound one night, and Friday tells him that for once he’s caught up on his emails and paperwork, and he’s off the hook from Pepper for SI work the next few days. He actually has a moment to decide how to spend his afternoon before Natasha comes to go over more UN shit with him.

The first thing he does is pour himself a glass of scotch. The second is to check the flip-phone.

There’s nearly a dozen photos from Steve. Tony checks their last conversation, and this time they’d ended the conversation together, even said “good night” to each other like adults. So Steve hadn’t been waiting for a reply from him. He’d just sent him a photo of a dog with pink toenail polish, a shot of a “New York style” pizza restaurant being built in what might be Wakanda (scaffolding looks the same everywhere), a snapshot of Wanda and Sam drinking bubble tea, a blurry picture of a hummingbird, and a series of pencil drawings of subway cars.

 

 **Tony:** _okay I’m asking_ _  
_ **Tony:** _what’s with the pictures you’re always sending me?_

 **Steve:** _they’re just pictures_

 **Tony:** _I don’t just sit around all day idly waiting to hear from you, you know_

 **Steve:** _I know that_

 **Tony:** _so you’re what, bored?_

 **Steve:** _have you ever heard the expression “if you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all”_ _  
_ **Steve:** _that’s not an insult by the way_

 **Tony:** _gosh thanks for clarifying_

 

It still sounded like an insult, but Tony could pretend to be patient for an explanation of how it wasn’t. How did Steve manage to be so sanctimonious even over texts?

 

 **Steve:** _sometimes I don’t have anything to say at all_ __  
**Steve:** _any words to say I mean_ _  
_ **Steve:** _but I have the pictures_

 **Tony:** _so you’re saying you sent them to me because you wanted to send them to me_

 **Steve:** _sure_ __  
**Steve:** _I sent them to you because I wanted to send them to you_ _  
_ **Steve:** _I can stop_

 **Tony:** _I didn’t say stop_ __  
**Tony:** _I just wanted to know the deal_ __  
**Tony:** _now I know_ _  
_ **Tony:** _I guess_

 

Tony ends up spending the afternoon indulging in some outrageous brainstorming, first for a hummingbird wing setting for the EXO-7 Falcon (maybe it could allow the pilot to hover in place instead of having to always be gliding to stay in motion, though what the wings would have to be made out of he has no clue) and then for an energy shield made out of charged plasma (there could be a practical application of that, you don’t know). He sends a snapshot of his workspace to Harley and then, after a moment’s thought, to Steve as well.

Then Natasha is there and they’re going over paperwork. Tony sends Steve a photo of her new haircut, one of the full moon over the compound, and one of the Kiefer woodcut that’s still hanging in one of the conference rooms.

The last picture Tony sends to Steve that night is of the confidential drafts of press releases announcing that Sam Wilson and Wanda Maximoff are absolved of all charges and cleared to return to the United States.

 

_________

 

####  **Good with people**

 

Tony needs people, but he doesn’t really understand them. There are too many variables.

He’s good with groups. Crowds, parties, audiences. Alien armies.

The one-on-one stuff, not so much. If he’s spent a lot of time with someone, he can usually build up enough data to create predictive models of how they’ll behave or what they’ll say in situations like ones he’s experienced before. This is useful for making sure he has a clear and reliable read on the behavior of anyone he’s going into battle with. It makes business lunches and board meetings tolerable, if rote.

But whenever there’s a factor he hasn’t controlled for, or a change to setting or circumstances, he’s lost. Not that he lets it show; he’s an excellent improvisor and performer, when he has to be. The problem is that improvising in a situation he hasn’t anticipated means results he hasn’t planned for, or can’t plan for.

He’s in Milan, which for some reason is where today’s meeting on the Accords is being held. After making it through security with his affogato, he finds the meeting room and his assigned seat. Across the table from him is Steve.

That right there is a variable he hadn’t predicted. And now he has to get through this whole meeting without being weird. Or is he supposed to be weird? Are people expecting him to be antagonistic? Or maybe he’s supposed to be the bigger person, shake hands, act like they’re buddies.

He considers acting naturally, but he doesn’t know what that looks like. The last time he saw Steve, Tony had been lying incapacitated on a concrete floor. They’ve been talking. (Well, texting.) But. _Are_ they buddies? Acquaintances who no longer want to kill each other? Former co-workers, maybe?

Tony decides to play it cool and professional. He gives Steve a little nod as he sits down, then immediately takes out a tablet to go over the files they’ll be discussing today. It’s not long before the meeting starts. Tony looks intently at whoever is speaking, or at his notes, wishing for Natasha or Rhodey or _someone_ to be here with him, and gets glimpses in his peripheral vision of Steve trying to catch his eye.

His pocket buzzes. He scowls at his tablet. His pocket buzzes again.

While some guy with white hair and two chins is droning loudly about presumption of innocence and _Corpus Juris Civilis_ , Tony pulls out the little flip phone. Steve’s sent him a photo of one of the duomo's spires, then one of some buttresses.

 

 **Tony:** _didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s rude to text during a meeting?_

 

Tony tries not to hear a buzz, followed by a low chuckle, from across the table. He focuses on the people speaking now, a pair of them gesturing at each other. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Steve methodically typing a reply.

 

 **Steve:** _must be one of those 21st century things I’m still getting the hang of_ _  
_ **Steve:** _are you okay?_

 

Tony glares at the phone for a while. He wants to glare at Steve, but then Steve might see him looking at him, so. Another white-haired guy—this one with significantly less hair, with jowls like a Neapolitan mastiff—is talking now, something about human rights and a lot more Latin than is strictly necessary. Tony taps at his tablet perfunctorily, then remembers that Steve can _see_ him avoiding responding to his text. Suppressing a sigh, he flips the phone open. Closes it again. Opens it once more and types an answer.

 

 **Tony:** _always_

 

He closes the phone and puts it back in his pocket. A woman with flat, brown hair has taken the floor now, peering over her glasses at each of the assembled group in turn. He meets her gaze when it rests on him, professional and attentive as always.

This time when his phone buzzes, Tony does shoot a glare at Steve. Steve’s doing this innocent face that works on _everyone_ but Tony can see through it. He’s typing a note about jurisprudence into his tablet when the phone buzzes _again_.

 

 **Steve:** _okay like that time you flew into the Hudson and broke three ribs_ __  
**Steve:** _or okay like how you were after that time Clint drank from the coffee pot like it was a giant mug_ __  
**Steve:** _or okay like you’ve just come up with a new invention and can’t wait to get out of here so you can go home and stay up all night building it_ _  
_ **Steve:** _or okay like you don’t want to talk to me about it_

 **Tony:** _how about like I’m trying to pay attention to this stupid meeting_

 **Steve:** _and here I’d heard you were great at multitasking_ _  
_ **Steve:** _it really is good to see you in one piece though_

 

Tony’s not sure how to respond to that, since it was because of Steve that he nearly wasn’t in one piece the last time they saw each other. And the other way around is true as well—he isn’t about to forget that. He’s saved from replying when Steve sends him another picture. This one is a doodle he’s done in the free spaces of his own copy of the files—printed out rather than digital, of course. It’s a flying buttress drawn in pencil, the sloping arch supporting the lateral wall of type on the page. It has fewer pinnacles and towers adorning it than the Milan duomo does, but that’s not hard to accomplish.

He’s still looking at it when he gets another one, a spread of fan tracery in the English Gothic style. This—this, Tony can do.

 

 **Tony:** _nice marginalia_

 **Steve:** _how do I always forget you know so much about art history_

 

Tony thinks, _because I cultivate the impression that my genius only extends to certain subjects so I don’t overwhelm everyone_. But he writes,

 

 **Tony:** _oh, I’ve got more where that came from_ _  
_ **Tony:** _I take it you visited the cathedral_

 **Steve:** _couldn’t resist_

 **Tony:** _I hear ya_ _  
_ **Tony:** _I mean—all those groin vaults. sexy._

 **Steve:** _I’m guessing your favorites are the ribbed sexpartite ones?_

 **Tony:** _hey, no need to be crass_ _  
_ **Tony:** _can’t a guy appreciate some intersecting arches without people making assumptions about him?_

 **Steve:** _it’s a tough world out there, it’s true_

 **Tony:** _fortunately I can get a kick out of a good cornice or gable or rose window regardless of what anyone else has to say about it_

 

Steve sends him more doodles after that, in the style of a medieval manuscript. There’s a rabbit carrying a lance and riding a snail, a cat licking itself, a gargoyle covering its eyes with clawed paws.

They keep up the text conversation after the meeting ends and they go their separate ways. Tony’s jet is over France when he realizes he’s spent the last several hours nearly smiling.

 

 **Steve:** _I was glad to see you today_ __  
**Steve:** _I hope it was alright for you_ _  
_ **Steve:** _take it easy, okay?_

 **Tony:** _always do, Cap_

  


_________

####  **Unforgiving**

 

Tony has already forgiven his mother, who did her best in a situation she never expected to be in, as well as Clint, who was an ass at the best of times (nevermind when he was incarcerated in a secret prison away from his wife and kids), and even for the most part Barnes, who was being used as a tool by Hydra. Sometimes he even forgives Obie, who would never think to ask. He may have been guilty of emotional manipulation, attempted murder, and selling Tony’s designs to terrorists—just to name the top three from a long list—but he’d also been Tony’s friend. He’d come to Tony’s high school graduation, making excuses for why Howard hadn’t made it. He’d scared off the press from his parents’ funeral. He had a copy of the article about Tony building DUM-E hanging in his office among his own press clippings. He’d been there when Tony needed him, times when no one else was alive or available or gave a shit about his well-being even as far as they could use it to their advantage. Even Howard hadn’t been farsighted enough to manage that.

(Tony doesn’t need to forgive Howard, because it’s been so long since Tony expected anything better from him he can’t even remember if he ever did.)

And he wants to forgive Steve, is the thing. He still hurts. But if Steve gave him the chance, Tony would forgive him.

It catches him off guard, when Steve asks. They’d been having a conversation about Käthe Kollwitz’s etchings—a topic they’d somehow reached from a discussion of Ursula LeGuin and Samuel R. Delany, but Steve has a knack for making everything about the German Expressionists—when out of nowhere, Steve writes,

 

 **Steve:** _what can I do_ __  
**Steve:** _for you to forgive me?_ _  
_ **Steve:** _do you think you can someday?_

 

Tony almost writes, _No, because I already have_. He almost writes, _No, because there’s nothing to forgive_. But for all that he’s dedicated to being as open and honest with Steve as possible these days, he can’t bring himself to be quite that vulnerable.

Instead he replies,

 

 **Tony:** _yes_ _  
_ **Tony:** _you don’t have to do anything_

 **Steve:** _are you just saying that so I stop talking about it_

 **Tony:** _no_

 **Steve:** _did I ever tell you how happy I was when you first showed up_ _  
_ **Steve:** _in Siberia_

 **Tony:** _you didn’t have to_ __  
**Tony:** _I could tell_ _  
_ **Tony:** _I wanted so badly to help you_

 **Steve:** _I thought that was it_ __  
**Steve:** _that I had it all_ _  
_ **Steve:** _for a minute there, anyway_

 **Tony:** _it would’ve been better if I hadn’t come at all_

 **Steve:** _it’s never better to not try to help when you can_

 **Tony:** _really_ __  
**Tony:** _you think it’s better this way_ _  
_ **Tony:** _what do you think would’ve happened if it had just been you and Barnes and Zemo_

 **Steve:** _it doesn’t matter_ __  
**Steve:** _because you came to help us_ _  
_ **Steve:** _to be there for me_

 **Tony:** _yeah and it went so well_

 **Steve:** _you might have never learned the truth about your parents_ __  
**Steve:** _which you deserve to know_ __  
**Steve:** _and if I’d never told you, or if you’d found out another way_ __  
**Steve:** _I don’t know_ _  
_ **Steve:** _then things would’ve gotten even worse between us_

 **Tony:** _worse than what happened?_ _  
_ **Tony:** _I think the only way things could’ve gone worse would be if someone actually died_

 **Steve:** _I’m not saying I’m happy with how things went_ _  
_ **Steve:** _but it happened and we can’t change it_

 **Tony:** _yeah_ __  
**Tony:** _I can tell you it would go differently though_ _  
_ **Tony:** _if I had it to do over again_

 **Steve:** _me too_

 **Tony:** _and I’m sorry it went the way it did_ __  
**Tony:** _shit_ __  
**Tony:** _you have me doing it too_ _  
_ **Tony:** _apologizing for what “happened” instead of being fucking accountable_

 **Steve:** _Tony_

 **Tony:** _I’m sorry I wasn’t someone you could trust_ __  
**Tony:** _I’m sorry I wasn’t a good teammate_ _  
_ **Tony:** _and kept ultron from you_

 **Steve:** _is that what you think it was about?_

 **Tony:** _I’m sorry I didn’t do more to slow down the accords or to protect Barnes_ __  
**Tony:** _I’m sorry I tried to hurt him_ __  
**Tony:** _and I’m glad that you were there to stop me from doing something I’d regret_ __  
**Tony:** _I’m still pissed you almost killed me though_ __  
**Tony:** _I mean I forgive you_ _  
_ **Tony:** _but I’m still pissed_

 **Steve:** _I’m sorry I kept things from you_ __  
**Steve:** _I always trusted you_ __  
**Steve:** _that’s not why I didn’t tell you_ _  
_ **Steve:** _you’ve always deserved my trust_

 

_________

 

####  **Stupid**

 

No one would ever say it out loud or in so many words—and Tony’s in part culpable in this instance, what with the playing dumb for the press on the matter—but seriously, what kind of unseeing dunce would he have to be to not notice that the “mysterious” international nomadic vigilante is Steve Rogers in a black tac suit and cowl? His sidekick’s mask and goggles cover his whole face, at least, but the EXO-7 Falcon wings are pretty distinctive even after being painted black.

 

_________

 

####  **Merciful**

 

Tony hears through the grapevine that Barnes is out of cryo and living the simple life in the plains of Wakanda these days. He figures Steve’s missions are going to take a backseat to quality time between the two men-out-of-time, for a while, and works on preparing the Avengers to fill in the cracks in the meantime. But the mission reports from the rogue Avengers keep coming in, as frequently as ever, as do reports of the masked Nomad.

He doesn’t ask Steve about it. Instead, he and Steve text about _The Silmarillion_ and Damien Hirst’s newest exhibit. He gets photos of Steve’s margin notes in _The Unbearable Lightness of Being_ , a sketch of a forested mountain range, a series of snaps of brownies being made from scratch.

For a minute there, maybe Tony had wanted to Barnes to die. Well, okay. Honestly, he’d wanted to kill him. He’d just seen the guy strangle his mom. It made sense at the time.

Now Barnes is living in the countryside with some goats.

If Tony prefers it this way, it’s not out of mercy. It’s not graciousness and love for Barnes. And for all that he’s forgiven Barnes, it’s not forgiveness, either. (And maybe it’s not that Tony’s forgiven him, exactly, so much as, realized he wasn’t really responsible.)

It’s that this way, Tony doesn’t have to hate himself quite as much. He didn’t go through with it, he didn’t _murder_ Bucky Barnes, war hero, legend, Steve Rogers’ last connection to his past. If there’s any self-hate happening here, it’s on the end of the guy who was brainwashed to murder the enemies of Hydra. That’s a worse punishment than anything Tony could come up with at the height of his vindictiveness.

(And if the guilt and self-flagellation Tony presumes Barnes is experiencing are occasionally interrupted by getting to spend time with Steve, well. Tony’s never said he wasn’t prone to envy.)

  


_________

####  **Omniscient**

 

In one of their earlier flip-phone-facilitated text conversations, Steve had mentioned that part of him had thought that Tony already knew that Hydra had sent someone to kill Howard and Maria, since there were references to it in the leaked SHIELD documents. He’d apologized almost immediately afterwards, saying he knew that was unfair and not the point, but it had stuck with Tony, how the only times Steve had high expectations of him were when he failed to live up to them.

As if Tony was supposed to know something just because the information existed out there in the world. There’d been thousands of exabytes of data in the full SHIELD leaks—what Natasha had put online was just the showiest, most damningly Hydra-linked parts—and most of that had been pulled from the more easily accessible parts of the internet in a matter of minutes. Of course Tony had retrieved nearly all of it, and yes, he’d been analyzing as much of it as he could, but he’d been focused on the “where might Barnes be now” parts of it rather than the gory details of everything the Winter Soldier had been up to for the last seventy years. For some crazy reason he’d gotten the impression that that’s what Steve had wanted him to concentrate on at the time. In fact, the more time went on following the destruction of the Project Insight helicarriers, Tony had sensed a distinct feeling of resentment for not finding the guy faster; it was like Steve thought that if Tony just _tried harder,_ then his algorithms would write themselves, he’d have access to high-res CCTV footage from the entire planet (without violating anyone’s privacy, of course, Steve couldn’t have that), and thus Tony would instantly track down a master assassin who didn’t want to be found.

Anyway, as annoying as being underestimated is, being overestimated leaves him feeling guilty and cranky. It’s part of why, even though he has several PHDs—some earned from finishing and defending dissertations as well as a couple honorary ones from various prestigious institutions—he doesn’t go by “Dr. Stark”; once the D-word is involved, everyone expects you to have a background in the biomedical sciences.

So he’s both surprised and annoyed when an otherwise normal-by-their-standards-these-days discussion with Steve takes a turn.

 

 **Steve:** _why do you keep calling Bucky my boyfriend_ _  
_ **Steve:** _you know he and Natasha are an item_

 **Tony:** _I can only say: wtf_

 **Steve:** _I thought you knew_

 **Tony:** _how would I know that_

 **Steve:** _I wasn’t trying to hide it from you_ _  
_ **Steve:** _I really thought you knew_

 **Tony:** _I’m not omniscient Steve_ __  
**Tony:** _seriously when did that happen_ __  
**Tony:** _was it when he was shooting at her in DC_ _  
_ **Tony:** _or when she was backstabbing me at the airport in Leipzig_

 **Steve:** _it was the 00s I think_

 **Tony:** _I say again: wtf_

 **Steve:** _you could ask her about it_

 

Tony wonders where this confidence in his powers of data analysis was when it came to the Accords.

He does ask Natasha about Barnes, and he learns that the Winter Soldier spent some of his unfrozen time over the years training agents in the Red Room and somehow also had time for a romantic tryst with an up-and-coming Black Widow. When she joined SHIELD, Natasha had figured she’d never see him again. When she did see him, in Iran, he didn’t recognize her. He remembered her once all of his memories came back. They’d spoken on the phone a few times after Siberia, and she’d spent a week with him in Wakanda before he put himself in cryo. She already has plans to see him again now that he’s out.

She tells Tony all this in a perfectly even tone while they’re supposed to be going over briefs on the legal standing of missions that took place after the Accords were passed but before they had time to go into effect. Then—because of course she realizes that he only knows to ask her about it because he’s been talking to Steve—she says, “Are you boys going to kiss and make up, then?” and before he can stop himself, Tony replies, “If he’ll let me.” Nat just smiles in that way she does instead of doing anything as demonstrative as laughing, so if he’s lucky, she thought he was joking. (He’s rarely lucky about that sort of thing, but he can at least pretend that she doesn’t know everything he’s thinking and feeling just by looking at his face.)

A few days later, Tony’s going through the photos Steve has sent him since he last texted—a hovering Wakandan maglev streetcar, a watercolor of a magpie in front of a golden sun on a crimson sky, a snapshot of Wilson tinkering with the Falcon wings—and rereading their last conversation. A thought occurs to him.

 

 **Tony:** _so_  
**Tony:** _since we’re doing the honesty and disclosure thing these days_ __  
**Tony:** _I ask you_ _  
_ **Tony:** _why was it important to you I know he’s not your boyfriend?_

 **Steve:** _I just want you to understand why I did what I did_ _  
_ **Steve:** _and that's a part of it_

 

Tony knows a non-answer when he reads one, but he drops it for now.

 

_________

####  **A selfish lover**

 

Tony has a good reputation when it comes to performing in bed, he knows that. (He used to hire people to check in on the pulse of that kind of gossip.) But he also knows that a lot of guys, and especially rich, privileged, good-looking ones like him, don’t even bother. (Yeah, fuck you and that “narcissism” shit, okay—when you’re over 40 and still appearing on magazine lists of the sexiest men in America, it’s just called “healthy self-esteem”).

It’s not that he's never gotten bad feedback before, either. He’s taken constructive criticism, grown, and learned as a human and a lover, thank you very much. Plus, Ty doesn’t count, and his complaints tended to be more along the lines of “more,” “now,” and “on my timeline not yours” than anything really related to skill. There was that neuroscientist in Bangkok, but it turned out she’d been looking for this really particular roleplay scenario that Tony had _not_ been expecting, so that’s hardly on him. He can think of a few others who’d voiced less-than-stellar appraisals—Anastasia had turned out to be a corporate spy; Cormac had ended up dating Justin Hammer for two months not long after his stint with Tony, so he was clearly just _bonkers_ (possibly also a corporate spy); and Bertram, Emelia, and Josephine he figures are statistical outliers. Can’t please everyone, and Tony’s entitled to off days. Besides, for every mediocre review he knows of, he can think of several rave reviews—plus Alessandro, who basically said that Tony had turned him gay; Marlene, who told him he was better at head than most of the women she’d dated; and Charlotte, who’d said she’d never had an orgasm with another person before him.

When Sunset had ended things, she’d come right out and said that the sex had been the best part, and that was back in undergrad. He’s only been practicing and improving since then.

And there was also Ahmed, the archeology professor who always gave Tony a booty call when he was passing his way on the lecture circuit. (Not that seeking out repeat performances from Tony is exceptional; most of the people given an opportunity to try for a second time go for it, and he’s had his share of fuckbuddies. But Ahmed is, like, underwear-model-hot and travels the world for his work. He has options.) Plus there was that guy, Miguel, who actually _was_ a model (watches, Tony thinks it was), who used to go to all the same clubs around LA and Malibu as Tony back when; he’d kept coming back for more too and had recommended him to some friends. Likewise, Natsuki had been so on board that after the first time, she’d invited her husband, so all three of them could have a good time, and Tony figures that has to count for something from a pair of international pop music stars.

Pepper, well. She and Tony were, when you add up all the time they were actually a couple, the longest relationship he’s ever had. (Longer even than him and Ty. Yeah, fuck you, Ty.) So the reckoning is different, surely. When things were good, she’d professed to enjoy the sex. Enjoy, hell—she’d said she was borderline addicted to it. When things weren’t good, or they were fighting—Tony’s never added it up to see how the good times stack up against the less good times in the grand tally of things, and he never will—she’d suggested more than once that he put some of the observational skills and selflessness he practiced during sex to other parts of their relationship. She’d told him that she wished they were the type of people who could just be friends who have great sex instead of having to figure out everything else about being together—being on time to dates, communicating about feelings, being present for one another, and having real conversations about fears and Iron Man and acceptable risks and all that. (Tony thinks he might be able to be that kind of person, a person who can just be friends with someone and have great sex with them, but it’s moot, apparently.)

It was only that handful of times with Steve, but Tony’s sure that’s because Steve is a repressed, sanctimonious asshole obsessed with his not-dead friend, not because of any failing on Tony’s end. This is supported by how, when Steve came to Tony’s penthouse for time number 2, he’d opened with, “Tony, I can't stop thinking about that time we were together” and then spent the whole night saying things like, “God, yes, this is even better than I remembered.” Further evidence: the number of times he called out Tony’s name during each of the times they slept together (many) vs. the number of times he said anyone else’s name those nights, even when they were fully clothed (none). Plus, the _way_ he said Tony’s name. Christ, Tony still thinks about it. There was also totally the night they were sharing a bed at the Barton farm, when Tony woke up from another goddamn nightmare about the apocalypse (so long and thanks for all the visions, Wanda) and heard Steve calling his name in his sleep. Tony had wondered for a fleeting moment if Steve was having the same kind of nightmare about _him,_ and then he’d looked down to see that Steve was having an entirely different kind of dream. (After that, Tony had fled back to the barn to dismantle and then rebuild Clint’s stupid tractor, because he’s _trying_ with the boundaries. And he’s always one to avoid an awkward conversation if he can.)

All in all, there’s plenty of data to interpret, and it points to Tony being great in bed. He figures it’s okay to be kinda proud of that.

 

_________

 

####  **A (good) role model**

 

Oh, Tony knows he’s a role model. But he has the self-awareness to see he's not a very _good_ one. He tries, of course he does. But that’s not enough. (When is he ever?)

Harley, at least, mostly has normal person problems. Tony can research or even outsource questions about picking colleges, about bullies and cliques, about taking care of a younger sibling.

But that email from the 16-year-old girl who’s a sophomore at MIT, with the video of her _flying away_ from campus security in her _homemade Iron Man suit_ —yeah, that one feels beyond his scope.

“Is this a race thing?” Rhodey asks when Tony shows him the email and the video.

“No. Yes. Partially? Look.” Tony scrubs at his face with both hands. “You don’t have to talk to her if you don’t want to. I’m looking for your advice more than anything else, here.”

“Okay, talk to me,” Rhodey says, because he’s the best. Tony doesn’t deserve him.

“I fucked things up with the spiderling, I know that,” Tony begins. Rhodey gives him a look that says _Dude, c’mon_ , but he doesn’t voice it out loud. “I’m working on that. But this girl, Riri. She deserves to have all the support she can get. She’s already at MIT on a full ride, and I’m making sure she has funding for anything she wants after that. Money, I’ve got it covered. The other stuff, the superhero stuff, she needs someone who’s _good_ at it. She needs someone like you.

“But the last thing I want her to think is that I’m handing her to someone else because I don’t think she’s good enough or she’s not worth my time or anything like that. I don’t want her to think that she’s getting you because you’re second-best, it’s the fucking _opposite_ of that! And I don’t want her to think I’m passing her off to you because you’re both black. I’m not saying that’s not part of it, because god knows there’s this entire part of her life that I’m never going to understand. I just don’t want her to think that’s the reason she’s talking to you instead of me—or to whoever I get to help me out with this, it doesn’t have to be you—when it’s because I absolutely could not deal if something happened to her like it nearly happened to Peter.”

Six beers later, they’ve talked the whole thing out. With Rhodey’s guidance—and some less helpful suggestions from Friday—Tony writes Riri Williams an enthusiastic reply, introduces Rhodey, and promises that they’ll both be in touch. Three days after that, Rhodey has a trip to Boston scheduled to hang out with her, and Tony’s already returned the schematics she sent with notes, worked up a nondisclosure agreement for her to sign so she’s clear to use an arc reactor without getting on the wrong side of his lawyers, and sent her the supplies she needs to power her suit for longer flights without having to use palladium.

Peter’s another story. Tony’s tried outsourcing on that, of course. Pepper wants none of it, and Happy can’t see further than his own guilty feelings after moving day. Rhodey’s helpful sometimes, but focused on Riri—now operating under the superhero name Ironheart—as well as his own campaigning on the Accords, not to mention being an active Avenger, recovering from a spinal injury, and still being on active duty in the Air Force. Tony’s even tried asking Natasha, but it turned into yet another discussion of the Accords and the legal status of masked vigilantes (Daredevil and Iron Fist as well as Spidey) and unmasked super-people (Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Quake). Ever since hot Aunt May found out about the secret identity thing, Tony’s on thin fucking ice, and now he has another grown-up to hold him accountable, leaving him with a recourse that he’s both dreading and longing for.

 

 **Tony:** _remember that kid from Queens_

 **Steve:** _rings a bell_

 **Tony:** _what if I said I needed your help with him_

 **Steve:** _then I’d ask you what kind of help_

 **Tony:** _mentoring help?_ __  
**Tony:** _it’d be good publicity for you too_ _  
_ **Tony:** _your triumphant return to the US and all that_

 **Steve:** _I’m not ready to sign the Accords_

 **Tony:** _nah, that’s not it_ __  
**Tony:** _the Accords are not ready for you, Steve Rogers_ __  
**Tony:** _and that’s not the point_ __  
**Tony:** _I’m not asking you to become an Avenger_ __  
**Tony:** _I mean you’ll always be an Avenger_ __  
**Tony:** _but yeah, I’m not asking you to be the kind that has to sign the Accords and the new contracts the state dept is forcing on us_ __  
**Tony:** _I’m saying_ __  
**Tony:** _what if in between nomadic expeditions you stopped by NY sometimes_ _  
_ **Tony:** _and hung out with the spiderling_

 **Steve:** _and here I’d heard you had no information on or connection with the masked vigilante known as Nomad_

 **Tony:** _hmm I think I heard that too_ __  
**Tony:** _well whatever it is you get up to when you’re not sending me pics of zoo animals or whatever_ __  
**Tony:** _I don’t care_ _  
_ **Tony:** _can you come to NY or what_

 **Steve:** _I saw him on the news_ _  
_ **Steve:** _they’re calling that guy the Vulture_

 **Tony:** _ugh, everyone and the bird names_

 **Steve:** _he’s doing great Tony_ _  
_ **Steve:** _why do you need me?_

 **Tony:** _so_ __  
**Tony:** _lemme tell you about this kid_ __  
**Tony:** _ok wait first_ _  
_ **Tony:** _do you remember what you said to me_

 **Steve:** _which time_

 **Tony:** _about a situation going south_

 **Steve:** _yeah I remember_

 **Tony:** _when I asked Peter to come to Germany_ __  
**Tony:** _I asked him why he does the Spiderman thing_ __  
**Tony:** _he said_ __  
**Tony:** _“if you can do the things that I can do, but you don’t, and then the bad things happen, they happen because of you”_ __  
**Tony:** _it reminded me of you_ __  
**Tony:** _of what you said then_ _  
_ **Tony:** _it’s why I wanted him at my back_

 **Steve:** _has he signed the Accords?_

 **Tony:** _fuck no he’s not even a legal adult_ _  
_ **Tony:** _his aunt would manslaughter me_

 **Steve:** _set it up_ _  
_ **Steve:** _I’ll come to NY_

  


_________

 

####  **A Captain America fanboy**

 

There’s this photo that the press has been running nonstop ever since they got wind of Steve’s disagreement with the Accords and what they like to call the “superhero Civil War.” Tony’s 6 years old, sitting in an overstuffed wingback armchair, reading a Captain America comic book. On the cover, Cap is crouched, ready to spring, his shield flush with the plane of the image, the crumpled form of the Red Skull at his feet. Resting on a windowsill to one side of the chair is Howard’s prototype for the real thing.

 _Tony Stark_ : _Fighting his Childhood Hero_? One of the headlines had read.

The truth is, that had all been Howard. The comic book, the photo. The poster of Cap in his garish red boots standing in front of a waving American flag, the one that had hung in Tony’s bedroom until he’d covered it in band posters. It was Howard who’d wanted Tony to be like Cap, this ever-changing finish line of what it meant to be good and manly, when Tony would have preferred to be in the lab building things.

Tony’s childhood heroes had been many and varied and none of them had been Captain America. There had been Sir Gawain, Aragorn son of Arathorn, Nikola Tesla, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing. Even just narrowing it down to the Howling Commandos, as a kid Tony had been most interested in Bucky Barnes, and then once puberty hit and he’d started noticing things like the width of man’s shoulders or how he carried himself in a leather jacket, he’d had a soft spot for Jim Morita. If you want to talk about favorite captains, Captain America wouldn’t have rated in the top five. No, for all of Tony’s childhood, that had been Captain James Tiberius Kirk.

It was no competition, really. Kirk had a spaceship with phasers and tractor beams and transporters. He got to work in space and live on the _Enterprise_ with all his best friends, who loved him and shared private jokes and were unflinchingly loyal in the face of death, court martial, and enhanced, revenge-bent humans. What did Cap have? A shield that Howard had been too blackout drunk to remember making.

As the years went on, Tony’s loyalties had shifted, a bit. There may have been a couple of years there when Han Solo had taken the lead in the ranking of heroic captains, though that was largely due to the way Harrison Ford walked with his gun belt slung low over his hips. With the release of “Wrath of Khan” in ’82, the coolest and smartest Star Trek character had finally had his promotion to captain, and Captain Spock had beaten out Kirk in Tony’s captain-related affections. Starting in 1987, his favorite captain was Jean-Luc Picard. Because hello, Patrick Stewart. These days, it’s hands-down Benjamin Sisko. Kirk and Picard hadn’t had to make hard decisions, not really. They hadn’t been written that way. Sisko was the only one in the whole of the Star Trek universe who faced anything like real life problems, and he did what had to be done. Picard would have quoted Shakespeare and Kirk charmed and flirted and cajoled until the Romulan Empire joined the war against the Dominion; Sisko had to do it with subterfuge and murder.

No, as far as Captain America goes. Tony’s always preferred Steve.

 

_________

 

####  **Bitter**

 

It’s not that Tony’s _never_ bitter. God no, he knows bitterness.

It’s that when it comes to Steve and certain things that happened between them, he’s not—or not very much—any more.

Steve’s visit to New York goes as planned. He and Peter hang out and do some training at the compound, then head to the city for a press conference and conspicuous sightseeing. Tony does his best to limit the number of journalists and to keep it to people who won’t fuck Steve over too badly in their coverage, but he still feels a little guilty at the necessity of that part; he knows Steve hates doing that kind of thing. Peter wears his new uniform, Steve’s in jeans and a too-tight tee. (Tony can hear the fabric screaming desperately for its seams to burst, and he’s not even there in person; he has SI meetings in Malibu the whole week Steve’s stateside.) All questions related to Captain America and Nomad are deflected; the line is that Steve is in town to visit friends, including the young hero Spiderman.

Tony is, in fact, feeling so not-bitter—what’s the opposite of bitterness? Umami? Sweetness?—that when he’s planning Steve’s next visit to the US, he asks Steve if he wants to see Tony in person.

 

 **Steve:** _of course I want to see you_

 **Steve:** _if you have time, that would be swell_

 

Tony’s sure he’s saying _swell_ just to get to him, but goddammit, it’s working.

This visit is more of the same, except that this time Steve and Peter are joined by Rhodey and Riri. After the photo op in the city, Rhodey and Natasha head to DC for Accords meetings, Riri and Peter hightail it to the compound workshop to make science together under Vision and Friday’s supervision, and Steve and Tony get hot chocolate from a cafe and then take the Bugatti to the mansion on Fifth, where Tony stays during stints in the city these days. Tony drives because, see above, not stupid, therefore, not going to let Steve traffic-laws-are-for-lesser-mortals Rogers drive one of his precious cars.

“Did you ever see the place back in the day?” Tony asks as they walk from the garage to the front entrance.

Steve looks at him in surprise for a moment—Tony doesn’t usually bring up anything to do with Howard. “A couple times,” he replies.

“I’ve made some improvements,” Tony says, shrugging.

That gets him a smile. “I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

They end up in the library, though it’s one of the few parts of the house that Tony has no plans to remodel. Tony leads them toward the moss-green velvet couch. It’s faced by a leather wingback armchair and a pair of stiff wooden chairs that he thinks might be Charles Rennie Mackintosh originals. He’s so used to the place that he doesn’t remember to think how jarring it can be for some people when they see the adult giraffe that’s the highlight of the taxidermy collection.

Steve blinks at it. “Nice…giraffe.”

The glass eyes stare indistinctly back at them. Tony laughs. “I forgot about him. You used to having the live ones around in Wakanda?” he asks, even though he knows there aren’t any giraffes living in that part of the continent. “Hang on, I’ve got something for you.”

Tony ducks behind a wrought-iron terrarium filled with mounted owls arranged in hunting stances over stuffed field mice—it really hadn’t occurred to him before how weird all the taxidermy might look to someone who isn’t used to it—and plucks Steve’s shield off the shelf it’s leaning on. Steve’s watching him so intently when he returns with it that Tony’s feeling self-conscious. “I just—it’s yours. And I know your friend Nomad can’t really be seen with it, even if I were to give it a paint job. I almost painted it just in case but I couldn’t bring myself to—I can if you want, I have the stuff for it in the basement. Anyway, you should have it, in case you need it, it should be nearby—”

His babbling is cut off by a hug. The shield drops onto the kilim rug with a muffled thud. “Thank you,” Steve whispers into Tony’s shoulder.

They spend the rest of the evening talking easily, maybe even more easily than they had before Ultron. At first it’s shop talk: Peter’s training; how everything is going with Riri; they even have a civil, if brief, discussion of the state of the Accords. Surrounded as they are by books, the topic soon turns to literature. Steve’s been reading Hannah Arendt and wants to hear Tony’s take on _homo faber_ , and from there they get to Umberto Eco, then Italian magic realists, and somehow onto their favorite books from childhood. Tony learns that they both read _The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle_ as kids, and then Tony has his tablet out to show Steve illustrations from _The Little Prince_. As they talk, Steve’s hands keep drifting toward the shield, his fingertips running across it for a moment and then returning to his lap.

Before long they run out of hot chocolate. Tony takes Steve on the scenic route to the kitchen and discovers he doesn’t mind hearing about what the foyer and drawing room had looked like when Steve last visited in 1944. When they reach the kitchen, Tony remembers that he doesn’t actually do any cooking, especially not at the mansion, and has no idea where anything is. They explore the contents of the cabinets together, and Tony finds himself defending the properties of copper cookware. “It’s classic, I would’ve thought that would be your thing.”

“It’s not practical, though,” Steve argues, measuring cocoa powder into a stainless steel saucepan.

Which is how Steve ends up on the receiving end of a treatise on the thermal conductivity of various cooking surfaces, looking amused even though Tony is bullshitting all the parts that have to do with actual food. (The parts about Fourier’s Law for heat conduction are all correct, though.)

Now armed with steaming mugs of hot chocolate, Steve wants to see more of the mansion. Tony shows him the billiard room, a dance hall, a formal dining room and an informal dining room, several more lounges and living rooms, and the hall where outdated Iron Man suits now join a small collection of medieval European armor and a single suit of ceremonial samurai armor. The next living room he shows Steve has been updated, with a needlegrass rug Pepper had insisted was crucial to bringing the room together, a fountain installation, and so many holographic projectors that the room can practically turn into a holodeck episode of _Star Trek_.

It’s the wee hours of the morning when they end up in the conservatory, which is where they discover that it’s started raining at some point in the evening. The sound of the raindrops on the glass mingles, soporific, with the noises of the city, and before Tony knows it he’s collapsed on the cushions of a window-seat, drifting off under the big potted orange tree.

When Tony’s alarm goes off in the morning, the sky outside the wall of glass is gray, and Steve is dozing on a pile of pillows between an agave plant and the trunk of a palm tree, his feet propped up on the ridge of a raised lily pond. “You can keep sleeping,” Tony says through a yawn. “I have a meeting in a couple hours. There’s a ton of guest rooms if you want a real bed—”

“Nah, I’m awake,” Steve answers, though he can’t have slept well on the floor of the greenhouse. At least it’s warm in there, and somehow Tony ended up with a throw blanket draped over him.

Tony makes breakfast, which means he starts the coffee maker and impresses Steve with the number of greens that go into his smoothie. “Kale, beet greens, spinach, celery stalks—” Tony starts listing, but Steve cuts him off.  

“And I thought the powdered chlorophyll was bad enough.” He sounds fascinated despite himself, though, and finishes his whole smoothie.

Steve ends up heading to the airport before Tony has to leave for his meeting, so Tony has Friday order a car for him. After he’s waved goodbye and closed the door behind him, Tony carries his coffee back to the conservatory. Sitting there, surrounded by glass and growing things, he can feel the space where the bitterness he’d harbored toward Steve had been. It had seemed important to hold onto, for a while, but it’s nice, really, finding it gone.

 

_________

 

####  **Unsentimental**

 

Right after his mom and Howard had died, Tony had wanted to sell the mansion. Or burn it, maybe.

Jarvis talked him out of it. A few years later, when Jarvis passed away, he had that same urge to purge himself of Howard and his nouveau riche grandstanding. But then he’d gone inside, walked through to see if there was anything inside he wanted to keep, and found he didn’t hate the place any more.

He didn’t hate the French windows in the kitchen that reach from the surface of the countertops top of the counter to the molding that adorned the curved ceiling. The gleaming, freshly waxed, red-and-white checkered floors in the east sunroom looked gleaming, almost welcoming. The clipped yew trees were cut into Platonic shapes: spheres, pyramids, cones. The potted parlor palms and ficus trees that frame each door down the south hallway were taller than ever, their fronds brushing the ceilings. They’re all his now, to keep up, to change if he wants, to leave the same if he wants, to remember with. His mother playing Beethoven on the parlor grand. Obie stopping by the old playroom that Tony had turned into a workshop in his teens, sprawling on the window seat and listening patiently, nodding into his crystal glass as Tony described his latest breakthrough in adiabatic processes or how he’d changed the vacuum grippers on his newest robot.  Ana Jarvis bringing Tony a strawberry milkshake while he did his homework on the balcony of the second-floor guest room with the red curtains and the gold leafed acanthus leaves carved into the wood paneling. A physical memory palace, where he can pick and choose what to visit and what to change.

What he chose to do was to hold onto the mansion. He’d had the cars moved to Malibu—so what if they’d been Howard’s, they’re Tony’s now, and it’s not like he has memories of Howard working on them. He boxed up his favorite pieces of his mother’s jewelry, gotten art movers to pack up the Waterhouse and give it to Pepper (who’d always loved the pre-Raphaelites), rolled up his vintage poster of the starship _Enterprise_ , and not looked back. He hired people to keep it clean and aired, to manage the pools and hot tubs and fish ponds, to maintain the gardens, the greenhouses, the indoor plants, the topiaries, and the roses. (His mother had loved to prune and tend to those roses by hand.) And he doesn’t visit it. Well before the tower was finished or even a twinkle in his eye, he’d spent his visits to New York in a penthouse apartment on the other side of the park. After Siberia, it’s the tower that doesn’t feel like home any more, and he’d let his staff at the mansion know he’d be staying there from time to time. Sometimes something of the past is just what he needs.

It’s for sentiment, mostly, that he held onto the place all those years. It’s a broad sense of nostalgia—not for the mansion itself, exactly, but for something he can’t quite put into words—that has him come back to it, that has him drive down from the compound and spend the night in his parents’ old bedroom only to drive back upstate the next morning.

It was sentiment—and love, and gratitude—that had made JARVIS so special. Tony had missed the human one, missed him in a way that he hadn’t with his mother, a way that sometimes made him feel guilty, that made him open that cloisonné jewelry box he kept in a closet cabinet and stare at his mother’s rhinestone brooches, starburst earrings, and pearl necklaces. There weren’t many audio files with Edwin Jarvis’ voice, but Tony made do. He found voice actors from the same part of England where Jarvis had been raised to record the phonemes and prosody that formed the basis of JARVIS’ voice. He built himself a friend, programmed into him as much of the human Jarvis’ cheek and ersatz deference as he could manage.

A few days after Steve’s visit to the mansion, Tony wakes up in one of the remodeled living rooms. He’d fallen asleep on a Charles Eames sofa; the tablet he’d been reading is on the floor by his hand, his unfinished tumbler of scotch on a glass cocktail table designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. From where he’s lying, he can see stained glass windows, carved rosettes, and marble bas relief spandrels of the next room—yet another living room, one that he’d been thinking of turning into a home theater.

He takes a photo of the multicolored puddle of light that the sun through the stained glass is casting on the marble floors and sends it to Steve.

 

 **Steve:** _I didn’t expect to find you living in the mansion_ _  
_ **Steve:** _I was glad for the chance to see it again_

 **Tony:** _well, I’m turning it into something better_

 **Steve:** _sounds about right_

 **Tony:** _maybe not all of it_

 **Steve:** _oh yeah?_

 **Tony:** _I do like old-fashioned stuff sometimes_

 **Steve:** _is that right?_ __  
**Steve:** _well I like the changes you’ve made so far_ _  
_ **Steve:** _I like new stuff sometimes, myself_

 

_________

 

####  **A good listener, still**

 

Tony should know by now to pay attention when Rhodey tells him things. But this time when they’re talking about Steve, Steve is also texting him—he’s heading to a mission in Beijing and has just sent Tony a photo of the Pacific Ocean from his plane window—so Tony’s distracted. He has to ask Rhodey to repeat himself. “Sorry, what’s that, gummy bear?”

“I said, you’ve been seeing a lot of Rogers lately whenever he’s in town.”

“Yeah, it’s been good.” Taking in the stern expression on Rhodey’s face, Tony adds, “What, you’re worried he’s gonna nearly murder me again?”

“I’m a tad concerned he’s gonna hurt you, yeah.”

“No need to trouble yourself, sourpatch,” Tony says absently. He’s trying to pick which photo of Vision doing yoga to send to Steve. “We’re doing this whole upfront, full disclosure, honesty thing, it’s working out great. No more secrets and hiding shit. We’ve been talking about the Accords, can you believe that? Last weekend we even went over the Avengers contracts together without any yelling.”

“Y’know what you sound like?”

“What do I sound like, Rhodey?”

“You sound like when you first started seeing Pepper.” While Tony gapes at this, Rhodey grins and says, “It’s cute.”

“Cute?” Tony sputters.

“But seriously, watch out.”

“If I may quote the classic 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, _as if_. C’mon, you know we’ve already fucked it out of our systems.”

“You’re telling me you don’t want to bang Steve Rogers.” Rhodey’s eye roll is top-notch, and Tony voluntarily hangs out with teenagers these days, so his rulings on sarcastic gestures are more meaningful than ever.

“I think everyone wants to bang Steve. But I’m not stupid, I don’t want to ruin what we’ve got going now.”

“Yeah? What’ve you got now?”

Tony frowns. “Well, hell if I know!” He throws up his hands. “But it’s working. Better than before, even.”

“Just be careful, Tones.”

“Always am.”

It’s only two weeks after that, when Tony has Iron Man armor parts spread over the formal dining table in the mansion and Steve is bringing out the pot pie he’s cooked them for dinner, that Tony realizes he’s totally butt-crazy in love with Steve. “Shit,” he says, then almost says again when he figures out he’s spoken out loud.

“What’s up?” Steve asks—and oh yeah, it feels almost physically painful to see Steve frown in concern, Tony is _fucked_.

“Just remembered something I promised Pepper. I’ll deal with it tomorrow,” Tony says easily, and okay, maybe he _does_ lie about important things sometimes. But Steve has his sleeves rolled up and is carrying the pie out in two big red oven mitts, and he looks so goddamn adorable. Tony couldn’t stand to see him go again, so he pushes aside the maneuvering jets he’s reconfiguring and focuses on dinner.

 

_________

 

####  **A magical thinker**

 

Magic may be real, but as far as Tony’s concerned, it’s more like a branch of science with its own rules, separate from the physical laws he prefers to work with. He figures that Mjölnir’s seemingly inconsistent manifestations of mass and kinetic energy could probably be, in part, ascribed to specialized building materials (something he might have been able to confirm if Thor had ever agreed to bring his hammer to Tony’s lab). The delicately knotted Norse scrollwork that shows up like an Aesir crop circle after a bifrost activation is probably some kind of programming language, code that gets generated along with the manifestation of the Einstein-Rosen bridge. Hell, the one time he’d actually gotten a good look at a magical item, it was the gem from Loki’s scepter, which turned out to be an elaborate storage matrix for some really complicated code. Yes, that code led to world-destroying robots and was also somehow responsible for bestowing superhuman powers on the Maximoff twins, but it was still just code. He’s heard about Dr. Stephen Strange too, of course; nice facial hair, way too tall for his own good. As much as everything that guy does gives Tony goosebumps, it does have its own internal consistency. Same with Wanda’s glowing red shtick. It’s not really Tony’s wheelhouse, but he figures there’s probably some kind of quantum probability field manipulation happening.

The point is, “magic” has rules and laws, just like any other part of reality. It’s not the poetic _deus ex machina_ of fairy tales, where wanting or needing something to be true makes it happen.

There’s a Venetian fairy story about a noble couple who wished for a son but couldn’t conceive. They ask a wizard for help, and the wizard just happens to have a magical apple on hand that will do the trick. (Does the wizard carry fertility apples around? Does he have other kinds of apples too, or other enchanted fruits? Does he sell the apple to the noble or give it away out of the goodness of his heart? Would the magic have worked with a pomegranate or a fig?) The husband brings the apple home to his wife, who accepts it without hesitation. Except! She doesn’t want to eat it with the peel on. She asks her maidservant to peel it. So, the wife ends up eating the pome of the apple, the maidservant the peel. Somehow, the consumption of the apple alters the laws of probability and conception such that, nine months later, the noble woman does give birth to a son. In the causal world of magic, the sharing of the apple means that he has skin as pale and white as apple pulp. Meanwhile, the maidservant too has a son, this one ruddy as an apple skin. This is all lead-up to the main plot line, which is even more nonsense about a giant bronze horse, a wizard’s daughter, some old fairies, a series of animal decapitations, a man turning to stone, and a wizard who may or may not be the same one who dished out the fertility magic in the first place. But the apple works as an example on its own.

What if the noble woman and the maidservant had each eaten half of the apple, would they have each had a small, premature, average-complexioned son? Or is it about something other than the quantity or volume consumed? Could a dozen women have each taken a bite of the apple and later given birth to sons with skin tones comparable to the ratio of pome to peel they consumed? Would eating just part of the apple increase a person’s fertility just in part, in proportion to the amount of apple consumed, or is an all-or-nothing situation? What if the apple had been altered chemically, cooked or mashed or baked into a pie? But there’s no point to this line of questioning, because with magical thinking—unlike the sufficiently advanced science of Asgardians and so-called Sorcerers—these things happen because that’s the story. Logic and actual causal relationships don’t enter into it. The parts of the apple determine the appearance of the two children because they’re thematically linked, no other reason. The magic that Wanda, Dr. Strange, and even Loki practice is rational. Magical thinking is based on associations, similarities and sympathy, contagions, and the fallacy that correlation implies causation. A magical thinker believes it’s raining because they’re sad; Wanda could just make it rain if she wanted the weather to match her mood, or move the clouds away from the sun to cheer herself up.

It’s no coincidence that magical thinking is one of the signs of narcissism (actual narcissism, not the popular psychology kind). Narcissists see themselves as perfect, and their understanding of reality is deformed to keep up that illusion. A narcissist requires a nonsensical framework in order to reconcile their shamelessness, arrogance, and entitlement with the belief that they are faultless and deserving of awe. Howard needed to send Tony away to boarding school because Tony reminded him of his own imperfections, and to his warped mind, increasing physical distance between them would eliminate those flaws. Howard needed Tony to be a disappointment and an ungrateful son, because if the reality was that Tony deserved better than what Howard gave him, then the consequence was that he was a shitty father, and that was a concept that was inconceivable for Howard. He also needed Tony to be a prodigy, a brilliant engineer, and an ingenious businessman, because as his son he was an extension of himself and his self. A magical thinker can hold all of these thoughts with no dissonance: failure and prodigy, disappointment and genius, ungrateful child and bright future of Stark Industries.

So Tony knows better. His realization that he’s in love with Steve isn’t going to transform or redeem him. It doesn’t change the weather or make birds start singing or fill his mansion with blooming flowers. It doesn’t fix the Accords or bring Peggy back or get Barnes his life back or heal Wanda’s psyche from her confinement in the Raft. It’s certainly not going to magically reconstruct Steve into someone who wants to be with Tony, just because he wants it to be true.

But. After everything the last couple of years. After Ultron, Siberia, and having Steve halfway around the globe. Even if part of him is saying _it’s not the same_ and _it doesn’t matter_ and _nothing has to change_ , he can’t have a lie, even one of omission, come between him and Steve ever again. He can’t hide something from him, even if it’s his own hopeless sentimentality. So, Tony decides he’s going to tell Steve about his feelings the next time he’s in town. They can discuss them and then, hopefully, go back to being friends and work toward being teammates.

What happens instead—at least at first—is that Tony picks a fight.

They’re alone at the Avengers Compound, sprawled out on adirondack chairs in the evening fog, and Tony is _going_ to say something to Steve about being in love with him, but instead he starts an argument about Wanda. He must have magic on his mind.

They’re already deep into it. Tony’s saying, “It was for her own protection—”

“She didn’t see it that way, Tony, and you didn’t even _tell_ her—”

“She was in a luxurious multi-acre compound with her android boyfriend, what’s the problem?”

“The problem?” Steve’s voice sounds especially loud against the blankness of the mist and the gray sky. “Are you serious right now? She’s just a kid, and you were incarcerating her—”

“Wow, a ‘kid?’ ‘Incarcerating?’” Tony makes himself laugh. “She was an Avenger, and I grounded her because people wanted to murder her. Hell, they get all villagers with pitchfork and torches at her—”

“So you stop people from murdering her, you don’t remove her freedom, lock her in a tower like—” This time Steve cuts himself off. “Tony, what are we doing?”

“What we always do,” Tony replies, and okay, maybe he’s a little bitter.

“I’m tired of fighting with you.” Steve’s voice is quiet now, and Tony can’t read the expression on is face.

“Me too,” Tony admits. “We’re not going to agree, though. On a hell of a lot of things.”

“That doesn’t mean we have to keep fighting,” Steve insists.

“Yeah, okay.” What is he doing? Why can’t he just have a normal conversation with Steve? _This_ is _a normal conversation for us_ , part of him thinks, and maybe that was true years ago, but weren’t they building something better? He misses the talks about Fluxus and social sculpture, about exilliteratur writers and existential phenomenology—about baseball, para-aramid synthetic fibers, an Ikea opening in Wakanda, flare-deployment systems, the constellation globe in the mansion library next to the taxidermy finches.

“I’m in love with you,” Tony blurts.

“What?”

“I said I’m in love with you.” Tony crosses his arms, and he might be glaring a little bit.

Steve’s frown deepens. “Why would you say that?”

“Why would I say that?” Tony repeats. He’s not sure how he expected this conversation to go, but this isn’t it. “Why does anyone say something like that? Look, I’m not” —he waves his hands, trying to find a gesture to communicate his meaning— “ _expecting_ anything from you. I just don’t want to keep secrets anymore, even about stupid stuff. And I realized the other day, so. I’m telling you.”

“Stupid stuff,” Steve echoes.

“Jesus, can you just _say_ something?”

“I’m saying something!”

“Well I don’t know _what_!” Tony scrubs at his face. “I’m sorry I picked a fight with you, okay? I was trying to put off saying something because I knew I had to, and—I wasn’t looking forward to this conversation. So can we just get it over with?”

“This conversation?”

“This conversation that I seem to be having _by myself_. Am I speaking into a canyon? Is this an echo?”

“I’m trying to think, okay?”

“Okay, fine,” Tony grumbles. He stares into the trees, or as much of them as he can see through the fog. There’s a squirrel tossing acorns from an oak not far from where they’re sitting, but soon it scampers away, and there’s nothing much to look at any more. He starts tapping his foot, realizes how loud it is, and stops. “Should I just go, or—”

“Tony,” Steve says on a heavy exhale. “What do you want?”

“World peace.”

“Tony,” Steve says again.

“I don’t want you to go again,” Tony spits out. “I want you here, with me, not on the other side of the planet thinking I want to kill you and your childhood bestie. And the only way I can think to do things differently this time is to tell you the truth, try to talk about things like adults instead of brawling in airports, and hope that I’m not going to lose your friendship again.”

“You want to be with me,” Steve says, because apparently his way of processing is to keep saying over again what Tony’s just said. At least this time he’s rephrased it slightly.

“Do you need a minute with a transcript of our conversation so far?”

“No, I meant— _how_ do you want to be with me?” Steve’s staring at him now.

“However you’ll let me,” Tony admits. “You said, in your letter. That I need a family.”

“We all do,” Steve agrees.

“That letter really pissed me off, you know?”

Steve smiles a little. “I got that impression, yeah.”

“That part pissed me off especially, because. You’re my family, Steve. And you were _gone_.” It’s hard to look Steve in the eye right now, but he’s trying anyway. He doesn’t say, _And you lied to me_. He doesn’t say, _And you chose him over me_. That part’s over, it’s not what matters right now. “Just tell me how to make things okay.”

“That’s all I’ve been trying to do.”

“Me too.”

“I thought things were going okay, lately,” Steve says softly.

“God Steve, of course they are! I meant that I can’t mess this up again, you know? And not just for myself. People need us, and when we fuck up, we fuck up big. People get hurt.” Tony thinks of Pietro, of Rhodey, of Wanda, of Bucky. “I’m trying to figure out what you need from me.”

“Tony,” Steve breathes. “You’ve already given me so much.” He stares for another moment, then his eyes flick away. He licks his lips. “Can I kiss you?”

“Sure,” Tony barely finishes saying before it’s happening—Steve is crouching beside his chair, arms over his shoulders, and his mouth is soft against Tony’s. It feels like he’s searching for something, exploring Tony’s lips with his own, tasting his tongue.

The kiss ends and Steve’s face is millimeters away, his eyes sparkling. “Any conclusions?” Tony asks, sounding steadier than he feels.

“I want to be with you too,” Steve murmurs. “I’ve always wanted to be with you. I don’t know how—how we got so far away from that.”

“Well. I’m here now,” Tony promises. He leans his forehead against Steve’s, needing the physical contact for reassurance that this is really happening, that Steve is really here with him.

“When we—before. When we were—”

“Fucking,” Tony finishes for him. He can’t help himself. “Or do you mean when we were fighting?”

“The first one,” Steve agrees. “I didn’t know if…I couldn’t tell what it meant. To you. We never talked about it.”

“Yeah, in retrospect, I didn’t really know what it meant, either. At the time...I just knew I wanted you, and you wanted me sometimes—”

“Sometimes?”

“Well, I’m hoping that you did actually want me those times that—”

“I always wanted you. I never knew where I stood with you. And you and Pepper—”

“And then Ultron, yeah.”

“I didn’t blame you for Ultron,” Steve says. At Tony’s look, he adds, “Not for long, anyway. I was trying to give you time, or space, or whatever you needed. But I wanted you here.”

“I’m here now,” Tony says again.

Steve brushes his fingers through Tony’s hair. “I don’t know how I got so lucky,” he says, as if agreeing. “I love you too, Tony.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“How’d that happen, huh?”

“You happened,” Steve says, as if that explains everything. “So, does this mean you want to be my fella?”

“You do that 40’s slang crap just to be cute, don’t think I’m not onto you, Rogers.”

“I don’t know what you’re flapping your lips about about, doll,” Steve deadpans, and then kisses him again. There’s more heat this time, Steve nuzzling into Tony’s face, his hands pulling their bodies closer. The wide wooden arm of the chair is an annoying barrier, but Tony manages to fumble across it to reach a hand to Steve’s jaw. Steve’s licking into him, slow and promising. When Steve pulls back, he’s smiling, and then he’s planting small pecks along the corners of Tony’s lips, along his beard, his cheeks, his eyelids.

“Yeah, I wanna be your fella,” Tony confirms, a little breathless. Steve’s tucking a stray curl of his hair behind his ear, and the feeling of his hot breath in Tony’s face is a mesmerizing contrast to the cold tickle of the evening mist that presses against the rest of him. “So, do I get to brag about it?”

“Brag about it?”

“That I’m dating Captain America.”

“I’m not Captain America any more,” Steve corrects, not sounding as sad or resigned about it as Tony would’ve expected.

“Sure you are. Always. On your terms. We’ll make it happen,” Tony assures him.

“Tell anyone you want,” Steve agrees. “I’m already updating my Twitter followers that Iron Man and I are going steady.”

“You don’t have a Twitter, you liar.”

“I might have one,” Steve counters.

“Steve?”

“Yeah?”

“Wanna come to bed?”

The grin that answers him is electrifying. Steve’s already standing, Tony’s hand in his, pulling him up. “Sure thing,” he says.

 

_________

 

####  **Minimalist**

 

Interior decorating aside, Tony is a maximalist all the way.

It’s not his fault that bigger often _is_ better. He didn’t write the laws of physics.

His designs tend to be streamlined, sure, but that’s just about efficiency. (And more often than not, aerodynamics.) There’s no need to be wasteful with materials if you can avoid it, and all the better if you can show off how much you can accomplish using as little as possible.

When it comes to capabilities, minimalism is the last thing on his mind. He has an Iron Man suit for speed, one for strength, one for aerial combat, the one that’s optimized for fighting during a thunderstorm, the series for breaching Earth’s atmosphere, the nanotech series he’s begun, and that’s just to start with. Why stick to a car that can park itself, when you could have one that can drive itself, fly itself, and respond to voice-printed audio commands? Once he got the formula for Peter’s web-shooters, Tony fixed up his suit with web grenades, taser webs, splitter webs, rapid fire webs, ricochet webs, and approximately 571 other options. (And there might be a prototype of Rhodey’s prosthetics that has a nanotech version of the War Machine armor embedded in it—don’t tell Rhodey.)

Before Pepper absorbed the role, he’d had this one art buyer who got the idea—probably in part from seeing how his designer had furnished the Malibu mansion—to fill his collection with the work of Agnes Martin, Yves Klein, and Ellsworth Kelly. And Tony does enjoy the minimalists—in fact, he and Pepper once had a memorable date at the Chinati Foundation, most notable for how he’d valiantly resisted the temptation to use “15 Untitled Works in Concrete” as an Iron Man obstacle course. (Somewhere he still has the photo of Pepper pretending to break into Elmgreen and Dragset’s “Prada Marfa” installation.) But minimalism isn’t the only thing he likes.

He likes the mansion, too, even some of the parts that remind him of his childhood. (See above: unsentimental.) The rich texture of the sandstone blocks of the facade, the chinks in the wrought iron of the gates and hand railings up the outside staircase, the topiary on the front lawn. (These days he has them pruned to look like balloon animals, in a nod to Jeff Koons. One of these days Tony’s going to get proof that Koons is an Asgardian god of fucking with popular culture.) He doesn’t entirely hate the dentil molding in the west foyer, the ridiculous carved horses atop each pier of the back staircase, the fluted columns of the east drawing room and their ridiculously fussy corinthian capitals. High-pile crimson carpeting for the sweeping, bifurcated staircase in the entrance hall might seem over the top to some, but it’s classic. Grand. Epic. Since Tony tossed out the marble busts and super sized oil portraits of Stark forefathers (both real and those Howard had merely liked to claim relation to), something grandiose had to stick around.

The mansion, in its original form, is for certain moods, certain waves of nostalgia, times when he needs to be surrounded by something busier than the buzzing of his own mind. Other times he needs the sleek, mirror-like surfaces of a modernist room, or the utilitarian hodgepodge of screens, holograms, wrenches, and blocks of equipment that comprise his workshop.

Really, Tony’s all about using the right amount of materials to solve a given problem.

If the question is, how many brushstrokes does it take to make a painting? How many marks to make an image? Then Robert Motherwell has admirably shown that sometimes the answer is 1. (Or 4, or 5.) Cy Twombly has given the answer in hundreds of overlapping scribbles. Once you get into Diebenkorn or de Kooning or Wyeth or Hopper, you start losing count. Different problems, different solutions.

Like telling his friends he’s with Steve now; each presents a different dilemma, and a different approach.

 

 **Tony:** _are you in the mood to say “I told you so”_

 **Rhodey:** _to you? when am I not_

 **Tony:** _so I’m dating Steve_

 **Rhodey:** _always being right is a burden sometimes_ _  
_ **Rhodey:** _but it’s one I bear with dignity, grace, and handsomeness_

 **Tony:** _true words_

 **Rhodey:** _you’re such an idiot about that guy_

 **Tony:** _you love me anyway though, right?_

 **Rhodey:** _damn right I do_

 

So that’s one down. Arguably the easiest, but at least he has some momentum now.

Tony and Natasha are in the back of a car together, on their way to a meeting with the Avengers PR team to go over all their upcoming press obligations. They’re reviewing a draft of a schedule and proposed interviews when the conversation takes a turn to small talk—which coffee place to stop at, if those flowers outside the window are coneflowers or black-eyed Susans—which means she’s noticed he wants to say something.

“I’ve been hanging out with Steve when he visits,” Tony finally says.

“How’s that going?” Natasha asks, voice as mild as ever.

“Great, actually. We’re” —and here he wants so badly to be crass, to make it a joke, they’re fucking, they’re blow job buddies, they’re screwing around, but none of that is true, not really— “dating.”

Natasha, bless her, just asks how they’re planning on handling the publicity end of that, and they get back to business in a heartbeat.

 

 **Tony:** _guess what_

 **Pepper:** _absolutely not_

 **Tony:** _c’mon, guessssss_

 **Pepper:** _so help me, tell me what you did to my company_

 **Tony:** _aw Pep, why do you always assume the worst of me?_

 **Pepper:** _years of experience_ __  
**Pepper:** _Tony_ _  
_ **Pepper:** _tell me_

 **Tony:** _it’s not a disaster or anything, maybe I just have something I want to tell you_

 **Pepper:** _so help me god, just tell me_ _  
_ **Pepper:** _some of us have work to do_

 **Tony:** _I’m dating Steve_

 **Pepper:** _god, is that all?_

 **Tony:** _you’re not surprised?_

 **Pepper:** _you’ve been mooning over the guy for years Tony, of course I’m not surprised_

 **Tony:** _mooning?!_ __  
**Tony:** _who’s mooning?_ __  
**Tony:** _I don’t moon_ __  
**Tony:** _I’m more of a shooting star, if we’re going with celestial bodies_ __  
**Tony:** _(a meteor, if you enjoy being pedantic)_ __  
**Tony:** _(which, for the record, I enjoy quite a lot)_ __  
**Tony:** _and what are you even talking about, I spent years fighting with him_ _  
_ **Tony:** _until recently he was a fugitive_

 **Pepper:** _well, you don’t do anything small, do you_

 **Tony:** _I guess you have me there_

 **Pepper:** _you bought him an original Norman Rockwell_

 

More accurately, Tony bought the tower a Norman Rockwell and furnished Steve’s suite with it when he went on a redecorating spree after everything with Killian and Extremis. But what does that have to do with anything?

 

 **Tony:** _it seemed funny at the time_ **  
** **Tony:** _how was I supposed to know he would have preferred a Mapplethorpe?_

 **Pepper:** _you have a pattern of behavior when you like someone_ __  
**Pepper:** _it mostly seems to involve being as annoying as possible in their direction_ _  
_ **Pepper:** _followed by buying them things_

 **Tony:** _well, I’m all about results_

 **Pepper:** _I’m happy for you, Tony_

 **Tony:** _you’re really okay with this?_

 **Pepper:** _just spare me the details of your sex life and we’ll be fine_

 

Tony doesn’t make any promises on that front. Instead, they talk PR after that, and Tony gets to impress her with the brief plans he and Nat had brainstormed during their car ride.

The next time Steve’s on his way to New York, Tony stops Happy on his way out.

“You’re off to pick up Cap?”

Happy makes a face. “I don’t see why he can’t just take a cab.”

“C’mon Hap, we’re over all that business. Steve’s a good guy, we like him now.”

“I don’t trust him with you, boss. You said it yourself, he’s a sanctimonious dick! And he tried to kill you.”

“Bygones, bygones. Anyway, we’re dating now, so try not to be too much of an asshole on the drive in, willya?” Tony slaps Happy on the shoulder and keeps going before he can recover. “And, would you mind stopping for flowers on your way to the airport? Get him something big, like, embarrassingly big. Red, white, and blue. I know flowers don’t come in blue, get me something dyed, the more garish the better, he’ll love it. I’m talking so many flowers he can barely fit them in the back of the car. Okay? Great!” Tony shoots him a grin and leaves before Happy can reply.

Different problems, different solutions. If only more problems could be solved with Steve and unreasonable quantities of long-stemmed roses.

 

_________

 

####  **Vanilla**

 

On the topic of roses, long-stemmed and otherwise: Tony does, on one memorable occasion, have his bedroom at the compound covered with rose petals. Tea lights, pillar candles, vases of fragrant blossoms, petals blanketing the entire bed, the works. It certainly makes a pretty picture, Steve spread out for him on a bed of petals, but in Tony’s experience, it’s hard to go wrong, aesthetically speaking, when Steve and nudity are involved.

That first night at the compound, it hadn’t been slow, exactly, or careful. It hadn’t been fast, either, or sloppy. More—cherished. Guarded. Like they both wanted to rush in, to go as far as they could as quickly as possible, and were holding back instead. Tony loves it when Steve holds back, when his muscles are coiled and charged and all of that power is packed in there, directed like a dam, all of it coursing right to Tony. They stripped each other of their clothes and tangled up in each other, languorous, tenuous, in Tony’s sprawling bed, tasting each other’s skin and tongues and all of the little folds where their joints bent from the rest of their bodies.

It was different than any time they’d been together before, and not only, Tony’s sure, because of everything they’d said to each other. Before, they had mostly met up at the tower, never in a hurry, exactly, but frantic, like it might not last, like one of them might stop everything to laugh and say, “Gotcha.” (Not that it was only the tower where they’d fucked. There’d also been the quinjet, a hotel in Monaco, and the stacks of a research library in Edinburgh. But never at the compound or the mansion.)

The first time they sleep in a bed together as a couple, they start with Tony lying on his back, with Steve nestled into his shoulder. Then Tony’s arm goes numb and they curl up, with Steve as the little spoon. In cuddling, Steve prefers to be held. (Tony thinks, but isn’t quite sappy enough to say, that it’s like Tony is his shield. Instead he makes some more humorous comparisons between Steve and a particularly ancient tortoise at the Bronx Zoo.)

Outside of cuddling, it can really go either way. Yeah, Tony loves it when Steve doesn’t hold back, too.

People have this idea that rich, handsome types like Tony don’t bother to try very hard in bed. (See above: a selfish lover.) That also seems to extend to being vanilla—like someone who has endless possibilities at his fingertips is going to just stick with missionary every time.

Fortunately, not only is that untrue, but also, Tony has vibranium handcuffs and a titanium-alloy bedframe.

He adds Man Ray photo prints and a first edition of _Venus in Furs_ to his list of gift ideas for Steve.

 

_________

 

####  **Overly extravagant**

 

If anything, Tony’s a pragmatist.

Okay, so that’s not really what most people are referring to when they think of him as being over-the-top.

But really, if they could see how outrageous and flamboyant things are in Tony’s head, everyone would know how much Tony’s holding back—even when it comes to capabilities for Iron Man suits, or options of web-shooters, or gifts or romantic gestures. (See above: minimalist. Sort of.) When he’d been planning the rose petal bedroom schtick, he’d had some notes in there about building a Finnish-style sauna and writing a masseuse program for the armors, but had cast that off as being too much. See? He’s full of restraint.

For a while after Siberia, he’d wanted to burn everything down. Leak the video of the Winter Soldier strangling Maria Stark and let the media run with it. Pull footage from the suit of Steve admitting that Captain America was a liar and a hypocrite. Turn off all the locks and cameras in the Raft and see how Ross liked his plausible deniability then— _what_ secret, illegal, underwater prison for super-people? How can you sabotage a facility that doesn’t exist, Mr. Secretary?

What he did instead was begin the unending work with Natasha and Rhodey on revising the Accords and getting pardons for the rogue team. (See above: lawyer, politician.) He’s trying for this maturity, long-term thinking thing. (See above: a hot mess.)

He and Steve even manage to talk about it. Like, have a whole conversation about it, without yelling or tickling or changing the subject or distracting each other with sex or throwing any punches.

Steve, Peter, Riri, and Rhodey have spent the day using a soon-to-be-demolished Stark warehouse as the setting for a no-holds-barred, guns-blazing training scenario, and Happy has ferried Steve—backseat of red, white, and blue flowers and all—to the mansion for his date with Tony. Steve’s brought coffee, bless him, and they’re drinking it a corner of the gardens, admiring a koi pond Tony had forgotten he kept stocked, when Steve says, “I know accountability is important to you.”

“What are we talking about?” Tony asks, because the last time he’d checked in, the topic had been the history of the domesticated carp in East Asia.

“The Accords,” Steve says. “We can talk about something else.”

“Nah, might as well,” Tony agrees, feeling more wary than he sounds. He skips a pebble across the pond, where it dunks half a water lily underwater. A koi nips at where it splashed down. “And that’s a word most people don’t associate with me.”

“Then they aren’t paying attention.”

“I wasn’t exactly about accountability when I made Ultron and didn’t tell you about it,” Tony reminds him, for some reason. The sun is setting, and the light is golden and warm. The leaves of the Japanese maple and the stream of the waterfall into the pond are molten with gilded beams of sunlight.

“I think it’s why you made Iron Man,” Steve continues. And yeah, he can’t argue with that. “I mean, I can see why, with everything you went through, the Accords were important to you.”

“Well, thanks,” Tony says, not knowing how else to respond.

“It’s not that I don’t believe in accountability,” Steve presses on. “Of course I do. God knows I don’t always make the right calls.”

“Hey.” Tony takes Steve’s hand, squeezes it. “You do great where it matters.”

“No, I don’t. Not with you, Tony. That’s sort of my point. I lied to you.” When Tony opens his mouth to reply, Steve stops him, saying, “A lie of omission counts.”

“I forgive you.”

Steve’s face softens. “I know you do.” He kisses Tony’s forehead. “God knows why, but I’ll take it.” The wind is picking up, sending the lily pads churning on the surface of the pond. “I agree with the spirit of the Accords. I always did. I just don’t have a lot of trust in institutions to implement these things.”

“Can’t really blame you for that,” Tony agrees. “Not a big fan of the government much, myself.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen the videos from those hearings.”

“They were trying to take my suit!”

“Hey, I’m not disagreeing, here,” Steve says, placating. “Our government dropped atomic bombs on civilians. Interned our own citizens. The Accords are what put Sam, Wanda, Clint, and Scott on the Raft.”

“That wasn’t the UN, though,” Tony can’t help but point out. “None of that was. The Raft was all Ross. And it was extremely, extremely illegal.”

“The Raft was pretty legal as far as the US goes. And the UN is still governments. It’s still politics. Like the World Security Council sending a nuke to Manhattan to try to stop the Chitauri.”

“They were controlled by Hydra.”

“So who’s to say the same thing couldn’t happen to the UN?”

“It’s the UN, Steve. It takes them two decades and a million committees to decide that voter fraud is probably bad.”

“So, what if you need an answer faster than that? And what, that makes them immune to corruption or infiltration?”

Tony sighs and rests his head against Steve’s shoulder. “Were you going somewhere with all this?”

Steve chuckles. “Actually, the point I was trying to make is that we don’t actually disagree about it all that much.”

Tony laughs. He turns to face Steve, taking both of his hands in his own. “Oh yeah? How do you figure?”

“You’re practical. You knew it had to happen sometime, that we might as well go along with it if the principles were good and try to take control where we could. And that’s what you did. And the principles _were_ good, is what I’m saying. I never disagreed with the spirit of the Accords.”

“Just the letter of the law, then,” Tony teases.

“The implementation, yeah. And so did you. When it mattered, you broke them, too. That’s not an accusation,” Steve adds quickly, seeing Tony’s face. “I’ve told you how glad I was to see you in Siberia. I’m pointing out where we agreed, here. We both believe in oversight. And responsibility and taking matters into our own hands when someone else makes a bad call.”

“That’s true.” Tony contemplates this. “Why’d we fight, again?”

Steve shrugs. “Who the hell knows.”

“Let’s never do it again,” Tony says, and traces a series of kisses up Steve’s neck.

Steve takes Tony’s head in his hands and grins. “Deal,” he says, pressing their bodies flush together and opening his mouth over Tony’s, dragging their lips along each other, breaching the threshold of Tony's mouth with his tongue.

The next day, they go out for a chicken and waffles brunch. After a detour to try to find a vegan egg cream (it’s a thing, okay—you can find _anything_ in New York City, and Tony’s of the opinion that means you should go and find it) Steve and Tony end up at a gallery in Chelsea, standing in front of a huge collage, an expanse of densely scribbled figures and clutches of pink felt dangling and protruding off the page.

“I think I’ll buy it,” Tony offers. “Since you refused to let me get _Three Flags_.”

“I don’t think the Whitney was really looking to sell their Jasper Johns.”

“It just would’ve looked so perfect in your bedroom,” Tony pouts. “You like it, right?” Tony waves a hand at the piece before them.

“I love looking at it,” Steve corrects. “I think I could look at it forever. But I don’t know if I love _it_. It makes me a little dizzy, honestly.”

“I’m getting it for my suite at the compound.”

“It doesn’t really match the rest of the decor, does it?”

“We can redecorate,” Tony says easily. “I mean—not that I’m asking you to move in. Unless you’d like to move in? You can just—have input on redecorating.”

“I’d love to move in with you,” Steve assures him. “I won’t be there full-time or anything, but it’s not like you’ll be around all the time either.”

“Well now I’m definitely buying it.”

See. Steve doesn’t think it’s excessive to invite your boyfriend to move in with you after just a few weeks of dating. (Or to buy a giant collage on impulse and then redecorate their rooms so it fits in. Or to get in the Iron Man suit that night and fly Steve to Paris to celebrate. If Steve had to draw the line at Tony’s offer to buy them a villa near Giverny, well, most people are subject to impulses and flights of fancy from time to time.) Everyone knows Steve has impeccable judgment. So there you go: not overly extravagant.

 

_________

 

####  **Attention seeker**

 

Being followed by the media is a part of his life. That doesn’t mean he enjoys it.

A couple weeks after Steve moves into the compound, they’re driving the Bugatti back home after a busy day of public relations in the city. Steve and Peter had a photo shoot for _Vanity Fair_ and Rhodey and Riri are finishing one up for _Ebony_. Tony and Natasha spent the afternoon giving an interview for _Rolling Stone_. It’s ostensibly mostly with Tony and about the Accords, but Tony has a feeling the takeaway most readers will get is more about the tragic, decades-spanning, star-crossed love affair of the Winter Soldier and the Black Widow. Natasha had shed a tear and even smudged her mascara a bit wiping it away; she’d been talking about him not recognizing her in Iran. Tony might even have bought it, himself, if she hadn’t asked him that morning whether his usual eye makeup was waterproof or not and if she could borrow it. Not that he doubts her sincerity, or anything—simply the manifestation of it. It’ll serve its purpose admirably; Barnes couldn’t buy publicity that good if he tried. Tony’s more than happy for the topic of Natasha and Barnes to dominate the story.

It’s not like Tony’s trying to get noticed when it happens. True, the car may be on the distinctive side—he likes nice things, there’s nothing wrong with that, and red is his favorite color. But he’s wearing sunglasses even though it’s well into the evening, plus a comfy hoodie that he liberated from Steve’s dirty laundry, which as an ensemble doesn’t exactly scream, _Here I am, Tony Stark, please photograph me_. Most people take a while to recognize Steve with the beard these days, and he had on sunglasses _and_ a baseball cap. They’re stopping for snacks at a gas station on their way, in the midst of an argument about the merits of powdered cheese. Steve’s standing there so formally, his hands resting on his belt, holding his mouth tight and firm in that way that he has and looking just so utterly kissable.

Tony takes a moment to remember he doesn’t have to try to resist. He can just kiss him.

So he does. One of his hands has made its way to Steve’s ass when he hears the soft click of a photo being snapped on a phone. Then he hears the sound again. Then there’s a couple flashes, because the lighting in the gas station isn’t that great.

“So am I bribing these people to delete the pics, or what?” he asks into Steve’s shoulder.

“Well, I know we had that whole plan about announcing that we’re together on the Daily Show, but I’m not too fussed.”

“Your call, babe,” Tony agrees.

“Then let’s make sure they get some good pictures,” Steve says, reaching to remove Tony’s sunglasses.

“I’ll make sure they get your good side,” Tony agrees, pulling Steve’s hat off.

They’re back on the road before they cross the line into public indecency, and Tony puts his PR team on speakerphone for the rest of the drive. There’s a statement drafted and a plan in place by the time they reach the compound. Vision’s attempting to make pesto when they get in, so Tony puts an immediate stop to that; he recruits Vision as videographer and has Steve take over the cooking. Tony stands next to him at the counter chopping garlic, and if his dicing is a little inconsistent, it still looks great on camera—a lovely scene of domesticity at the Avengers compound. Tony sticks close to the script the team put together for him—Steve follows a bit better, of course, though he finds some ways to interject some sass as well—and only pats Steve on the ass once and fondles his biceps twice, which he counts as an admirable show of restraint.

The video and the statement are published before they finish eating dinner, but they’ve decided they have more important things to worry about that night. (Things like groping each other in the shower and then doing things to each other in bed that necessitate a second round of bathing.) When they get up in the morning, Wanda has made enough bialys for everyone, and Friday has the highlights of the media responses to their outing all set out for them. It’s about what they expected; a lot of people are eating up the story of setting aside differences to find love, while a certain subsection is more focused on hellfire and damnation.

“I don’t get the people who think it’s a publicity stunt,” Steve says through a mouthful of poppy seed bialy. “What would the point of that be?”

“To make me look awesome.”

“You do that all on your own.”

“Hey.” Tony squeezes Steve’s hand. “Thanks for putting up with this. The media bullshit, and all that.”

“I think the media would care who Captain America was dating even if it wasn’t you.”

“Still. Doesn’t mean it’s any fun for you.”

“Tony.” Steve has that concerned, earnest look on his face, the one that usually means trouble. “I know it’s not fun for you either.”

Tony shrugs. “I’m good at it.”

“But do you like it?”

Tony can’t lie to those blue eyes. “Of course not. I want you all to myself.”

Steve answers that with a kiss. “You’ve got me.”

It turns out facing media bullshit is a lot easier with Steve beside him.

 

_________

 

####  **A (bad) role model**

 

Tony opens an email from Riri on his phone while Steve takes a call from Lang about something happening in California. They’re at the MoMa sculpture garden. Tony’s sitting on a granite bench while Steve absently weaves through a structure of mirrored glass and stainless steel. Her message was brief but dense, full of boundless excitement at a new teenager superhero she’d met during a road trip. Tony follows the link to a video—filmed on a phone with the wrong aspect ratio, on top of the low quality, barely watchable—of a slim figure enlarging her fist until it’s the size of a pickup truck and using it to knock down a goon running at her in full body armor. It’s pixelated, but it’s just possible to make out her outfit: a blue tunic emblazoned with a yellow lightning bolt. _She’s calling herself Ms. Marvel. Exhibits morphogenetics, elongation, size alteration, and accelerated healing factor. I met her in Jersey City. Also she’s super cute and smart and amazing! She’s a big Iron Man fan and was beyond psyched that I knew you. I gave her your email, I hope that’s okay?! Honestly she would freak out if she could even just visit the compound, please don’t hate me, I promise she’s rad_.

Tony writes a quick reply assuring Riri that he’s happy to invite Ms. Marvel to the compound—and do more, if she wants.

Steve rejoins him and they head toward Tony’s favorite Ellsworth Kelly piece, Steve telling Tony about Scott’s latest adventure. It sounds like it all worked out—everyone is fine, and Steve even got to say hi to Cassie Lang before ending the call. When they pass a Giacometti sculpture, Tony’s reminded of Ms. Marvel and her elongation powers. He reads Riri’s email and his reply out loud to Steve, who is thrilled. By the time they finish their circuit of the gallery, Tony has a hundred great ideas for a new uniform he can build for her.

It turns out that Rhodey’s girlfriend, Carol Danvers, is _the_ Captain Marvel: formerly a Ms. Marvel herself, the one who got up to all that crazy shit in the 90’s, and the inspiration for the young New Jersey hero that Riri’s alerted him to. Between Tony’s pestering and Rhodey’s puppy-dog eyes, Carol’s convinced to get in on the mentoring with Rhodey and Steve, and she takes the new Ms. Marvel—real name Kamala Khan—under her wing. (It didn’t hurt that Tony dragged—okay, _tricked_ might be the more precise word here—Rhodey and Carol along to a lunch to meet Kamala and her brother, Aamir, and Carol got to experience Kamala’s enthusiasm and amazing ideas for herself.)

A couple weeks later, Tony and Peter are in the compound workshop, developing a proof-of-concept build of an idea Peter had for some 8-legged, octagonal, modular robots. They’re waiting for Friday to run simulations of the swarm code they’ve added when Tony asks how everything’s going with Steve.

“He answering your texts? Showing up on time for your PR dates? Bringing you a corsage, scaring off major super villains with his shotgun and all that?”

“Who, Captain Rogers? It’s going awesome!” Peter says.

“C’mon, I know he’s told you to call him Steve,” Tony chastises.

“Last time he was in town we played paintball against Ironheart and War Machine. It was _epic_. I guess it was supposed to be some sort of tactical demonstration, but it just sort of turned into a brawl,” he adds with a frown.

Tony knows all about that. His bots are still trying to get the paint stains off some of the equipment. “Who won that thing, anyway?”

Peter makes a face. “Captain Marvel and Black Widow, technically, but only because they cheated. They weren’t even supposed to be playing!”

“Well, I’m glad it’s working out, kid.”

“It’s so great Mr. Stark, seriously. But, um. You weren’t so bad either.”

“That’s sweet.”

“No, really!” Peter insists.

“Did Steve put you up to this?”

“What? No! It’s awesome having Captain Rogers around and all, but it’s really cool working with you, too.”

“Yeah?” Tony aims for casual and tries not to pay too much attention to how far off the mark he is. Fortunately, Peter doesn’t notice.

“Like that time we were fighting those lizard-looking people and you asked what I thought we should do and then you totally tried my idea from that old movie where they cross the streams!”

“Well, it turns out emulating the Ghostbusters works out sometimes,” Tony agrees.

“It was, um, really great, too, what you said when Mr. Toomes escaped from prison?” Peter adds tentatively. “And when those guys tried to, uh, you know, kidnap MJ, and then the time that Ned—”

“Woa, slow down kid, I get the idea.”

Peter gives him a sheepish smile. “Sorry, it’s just really cool getting to hang out with you like this.”

“Don’t get carried away. Now c’mon, we’ve got some code to debug,” Tony adds, directing their attention back to the screen.

A few days later, Tony gets an invitation and two tickets to Harley Keener’s high school graduation. The kid’s gone and gotten himself a full ride to CalTech.

 

 **Tony:** _thanks for the invite, I’ll be there_

 **Harley:** _there’s an RSVP card_

 **Tony:** _I’m RSVPing this way_

 **Harley:** _omg use the card_ _  
_ **Harley:** _my mom’s using them to plan a party or something, just do it_

 **Tony:** _fine_ __  
**Tony:** _and congrats on CalTech_ _  
_ **Tony:** _you did good_

 **Harley:** _couldn’t have done it without you_

 

Harley says as much again during his valedictorian speech during the ceremony. Tony might tear up a little—fortunately he’s wearing sunglasses, so only Rhodey, sitting next to him, knows, and his response is just to scoff and elbow Tony in the ribs.

After all the speeches and processionals, they’re on their way find the Keeners when they’re stopped by a kid with an undercut and striped pink and orange hair. “Um, Mr. Stark?” they say, voice tentative.

“What can I do for you?” Tony asks.

“I just wanted, to, um. Thank you? For being such a great role model for queer kids. It means a lot.”

Tony is momentarily speechless. (Hey, it happens sometimes.)

Fortunately, Rhodey has him covered. “That’s so wonderful to hear. You’re the head of the GSA, right?”

The kid nods. “A lot of people in the group have said how important it is that Iron Man is out as bi. It’s, um, important to me too.”

Tony finally gets it together and says something witty and intelligent—probably, it’s a bit of a blur, honestly—and shakes hands with the kid, who goes by Mo. Tony gives them a business card and the website for the scholarship Stark Industries offers for LGBTQ college students. They end up running into Mo and their parents at the restaurant with the Keeners, and Ms. Keener insists that they all give a toast to Iron Man.

Two days later, Riri and Kamala stop an active shooter situation at a library in Philadelphia. Tony’s on a plane to DC with Natasha for more meetings when he gets the alert on his phone and pulls up the news on one of the jet’s TV screens. Ironheart and Ms. Marvel fill the screen. They’re standing on the steps of a classical marble building, being interviewed by a local reporter who seems intimidated by the armor—he keeps eyeing it and twisting away whenever Riri shifts or gestures. “It’s all thanks to Tony Stark!” Riri says at one point.

“Yeah!” Kamala chimes in. “We couldn’t have done it without you, Tony!”

“Smart kids,” Natasha comments, not looking up from her tablet.

Tony’s starting to think maybe he’s not as bad at some things as he’d always believed.

 

_________

 

####  **A bad friend**

 

The thought first occurs to Tony when he’s in Tokyo for a tech convention, wishing he were back at the compound with Steve. It’s moot, though, since Steve is visiting Bucky—the whole reason Tony agreed to leave town for anything as mundane as SI work in the first place. He’s back in his hotel room after a day of bullshit speeches and networking—calculating the time difference to Wakanda, opening a bottle of scotch, and wondering how much trouble he’ll get into with Pepper if a hangover prevents him from attending the breakfast event the next morning—when he gets a video call from Rhodey.

He pours his drink and answers.

“I did it, Tones!”

“Holy shit! Congratulations!”

Rhodey grins at him. “What makes you so sure she said yes?”

Tony scoffs. “Don’t be a dumbass."

“So you gonna be my best man or what?”

“What, Alex and Oliver and Uri all said no?”

“Now who’s being a dumbass?”

“For real?”

“You’re my best friend, asshole.”

“Uh, wow. Then, yeah, of course.”

So when he gets Steve's text he's still reeling from _that_ and is several shots into his evening.

 **Steve:** _we just got the news_ _  
_ **Steve:** _thank you so much Tony_

 **Tony:** _I hardly did it myself_

 **Steve:** _I know how hard you worked_ __  
**Steve:** _I know you did this for me_ __  
**Steve:** _Bucky’s really grateful, too_ _  
_ **Steve:** _I hope now that he can come home you’ll get a chance to get to know him and see that he’s worth it_

 

The idea that Steve wants him and Bucky to be friends, that he thinks it’s possible or even likely, is somehow more terrifying than thinking that Barnes wants him dead. Because the former he at least ostensibly has some control over.

 

 **Tony:** _I’d like that_

 **Steve:** _you don’t have to say that_ _  
_ **Steve:** _so, I can’t help but notice that you suggested I visit Bucky this week, while you had this super important conference in Japan you were suddenly thrilled to attend_

 **Tony:** _I just thought you’d want to be there with him when he found out_

 **Steve:** _thank you for that, too_ _  
_ **Steve:** _you’re such a good friend to me_

 **Tony:** _y’know, Rhodey just said something similar to me_

 **Steve:** _yeah?_

 **Tony:** _he and Carol are getting married, he asked me to be his best man_

 **Steve:** _lemme guess_ _  
_ **Steve:** _you were surprised?_

 **Tony:** _he has a brother!_ __  
**Tony:** _and air force buddies!_ _  
_ **Tony:** _people he goes into battle with_

 **Steve:** _he goes into battle with you, too_ _  
_ **Steve:** _you’re his best friend, Tony_

 **Tony:** _I guess he just has shitty taste_

 **Steve:** _you’re not as bad as people make you out to be_ __  
**Steve:** _you know that, right?_ __  
**Steve:** _you’re not half the things people like to say you are_ _  
_ **Steve:** _even Clint said so the other day_

 **Tony:** _wow and you’re usually so good at recognizing when someone’s being sarcastic_ _  
_ **Tony:** _Clint hates me_

 **Steve:** _well I’m not saying it’s going to be like it used to be between you_ _  
_ **Steve:** _but he’s been meeting with that girl, Kate_

 

Tony knows Derek Bishop, publishing magnate, from way back. They’d had a few years overlap at Phillips Academy Private Boarding School, and Derek’s dad had been a friend of Ty’s dad. More recently, he’d gotten caught up in some Spanish crime gang, of all things. Daredevil and some of the other local vigilantes took care of it, and once the dust settled Tony hadn’t exactly missed seeing Derek on the Manhattan gala circuit.

He’d been surprised to see his daughter, Kate, barely 17, taking over for him instead, not only in ballrooms and hotel conference halls, but in the boardroom, too. Then he’d gotten to talk to Kate one-on-one, and he was less surprised.

After that he was out on Iron Man business and ran into Kate, perched on top of a satellite dish on the roof of a skyscraper in midtown, wearing night vision goggles and aiming her bow and arrow at an international mob boss leaving the warehouse Tony had been casing, and Tony wasn’t surprised at all any more.

Clint is the only one Tony hasn’t talked to, since everything. He got a Christmas card from Laura Barton last year, which Clint had dutifully signed, so that’s something. Or nothing, maybe. Wanda’s living at the compound these days. (Not that Tony has any delusions that’s for any reason other than that’s where Vision is, but it means she tolerates him.) Sam’s working on starting a West Coast Avengers—along with, as far as Tony can tell, some kind of rock monster, a pyromaniac, and a furry who calls herself Tigra—which involves a lot of heavy coordinating with Tony and Natasha, plus a share of overnights in DC and at the New York Avengers facility. Even Scott Lang and Hope van Dyne stop by the compound for awkward lunches these days, instead of only using the facilities when Tony’s not around. But who else other than Clint is Tony going to recommend to a young archer?

 

 **Tony:** _if giving his retired ass more work to do and another teenager to look after is what does it for him, I can do a lot better than that_ __  
**Tony:** _there’s this kid, Billy Kaplan, his parents work with Helen_ __  
**Tony:** _he does freaky shit like Wanda_ _  
_ **Tony:** _just Clint’s jam, right?_

 **Steve:** _very funny_ __  
**Steve:** _but yes, he’s having a lot of fun working with Kate_ _  
_ **Steve:** _he said she reminds him of what he used to like about you_

 **Tony:** _harsh!_ __  
**Tony:** _way harsh_ _  
_ **Tony:** _Kate is a wonderful person and deserves better than Clint’s insults_

 **Steve:** _seriously_ __  
**Steve:** _he’s coming around_ _  
_ **Steve:** _I mean, even Nat’s on your side, how much longer can he hold out?_

 

The next morning, Pepper sends him a bouquet of two dozen roses. Yellow, for friendship. The card says, _Thanks for going to the conference, Tony._ He knows Rhodey or even Steve must have said something to her, but he’s starting to get the hint.

  


_________

 

####  **Unlucky**

 

Sure, Tony’s been kidnapped, tortured, betrayed by loved ones. His business has been sabotaged, he’s been heartbroken, he’s been underestimated, and he’s lost count of how many times he’s almost died. He’s failed people, watched them take their last breaths, watched them fall. But he’s still one of the luckiest people in the world. For one thing: all of that happened to him, and he survived. Hell, some might say he thrived.

Not just because of the money and privilege, either—though that’s certainly a vital aspect of it. What makes him lucky is all the second chances that have been offered to him, and he knows that being a billionaire has bought him more than his share of second, third, and fourth chances.

Beyond that, though, when the money hasn’t been a factor, he’s been lucky with the people in his life, and how many of them are willing to forgive him. He built weapons, ignored consequences, had blood on his hands, couldn’t save Yinsen. And he got to become Iron Man. He and Steve lied and fought and were manipulated and found myriad ways to hurt and destroy each other. And he gets to be with him now, to hold him and love him and show the world that they belong to each other.

By Tony’s estimation, it doesn’t get any luckier than that.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! This was a bit of an experiment, and definitely self-indulgent. 
> 
> Find me [on Tumblr](http://dirigibleplumbing.tumblr.com/).[Tumblr post for the fic here](https://dirigibleplumbing.tumblr.com/post/174460192217/into-words). 
> 
> I’m not remotely an expert in any of the things Tony would be so my apologies for any info I’ve gotten wrong or misrepresented! (Especially cars. I’m not even very good at driving them.) 
> 
> If you’re interested in Luria’s _The Mind of a Mnemonist_ , check out this New Yorker article on the book and what Shereshevsky was really like (he actually could forget things just fine): <https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-mystery-of-s-the-man-with-an-impossible-memory>
> 
> The Italian folktale Tony mentions is “Pome and Peel.” I’m familiar with the version collected in Italo Calvino’s _Italian Folktales_ , which I highly recommend.


End file.
